Demystifying the world of Headless Commerce by unpacking the who, what, how and why with agency and tech leaders…
With Jason Greenwood, Founder & Lead Consultant at Greenwood Consulting 🔥
How would you describe Headless to an alien?
I wouldn’t but here goes: headless is a specific architectural approach to building web experiences. One where the back end administration software/layer is separate, or decoupled from the customer experience software/layer.
What are the top three pain points Headless solves for a brand?
Depends on the brand but generally speaking: improved site/experience speed, ability to deliver highly custom UX requirements and keep in-house devs fed with endless work
When is a good time for a brand to consider a move to Headless?
Depends on the brand but unless they can realistically spend around $1m on the initial implementation and at least $250k/year on maintenance, they’re probably not ready.
How does your agency or tech fit into the Headless ecosystem?
We don’t. We’re an architecturally agnostic consultancy. We don’t do implementations so have no dog in the fight. We help merchants marry their requirements (and help them define them) with the best fit architectural approach at the time.
What’s your go-to Headless stack?
We don’t generally recommend headless for our clients as it’s too immature and costly still. But we’re consulting a client right now that may go with BigCommerce, Shogun Front End and Bold Checkout as their headless stack due to their unique requirements.
Any final thoughts?
We believe that one of two things is going to have to happen for ‘headless’ commerce to really go mainstream - especially for B2B merchants. And for good reason. Headless is still much more complex, slow to implement and expensive to build and maintain than monolithic implementations. So, either: (a) the major eCommerce platforms go headless with their own storefronts (eg: Shopify hydrogen/oxygen approach), or (b), affordable FEaaS (Front End as a Service) becomes the norm.
Thanks, Jason 🙏