The common thread between the approaches covered in the previous chapter is that they all handle both the frontend presentation of the site as well as the backend management. Historically, if you wanted to use a CMS for your store’s frontend and content, but wanted to use a SaaS provider to manage products and orders, it just wasn’t possible. Now, with new APIs and headless capabilities developed by BigCommerce, you can do just that, and more.
How is Headless different?
A “headless website” is one where the software running the backend administration part of a site (the “body”) is separate from the software running the frontend, presentational part (the “head”). They operate independently on separate systems/servers and communicate with each other via APIs.
One example of a “headless commerce” setup would be the use case we mentioned earlier, where the storefront is rendered by WordPress and the backend commerce processes are powered by BigCommerce. In this instance, the “head” is WordPress and the “body” is BigCommerce.
By offloading resource-intensive tasks like order processing and dynamic price calculation to a dedicated commerce engine (like BigCommerce), we can help prevent the performance issues experienced by systems where resources are shared. A headless commerce instance attempts to take the best parts of the other approaches and roll them together into something new and powerful.
