Dipping Your Toes into the Headless Waters - Why Jumping Into the Deep End May Not Be the Best Bet

In recent years, headless commerce – or the separation of the frontend and backend of an application – has emerged to offer e-commerce sites greater freedom of expression and the ability to enrich the customer experience. In spite of these advantages, maintaining a headless architecture comes with several challenges, including the need for additional resources to keep content and features updated and the risks of decreased site speed and increased security vulnerabilities. And, of course, there are additional costs for building infrastructure and testing.

So you need to ask: is going headless the right move for your organization? The alternative (supposedly) is to stick with the more traditional, all-in-one, "monolithic" platform approach. One key benefit of doing so is the built-in frontend that makes it easy for non-technical users to launch an online storefront quickly.

However, monolithic systems can lock an e-commerce company into one vendor’s pre-existing development environment and limit its developers to the most common use cases. In sum, the monolithic approach tends to work better for new businesses that wish to get a website launched quickly. But, our experience is that it’s not long before these businesses begin to feel restricted by their platform’s templates and tools. 

Are You Really Ready?

Making the decision to jump to a headless architecture can be scary. Migrating an entire frontend is hard, and more often than not you’ll also choose to migrate the backend, and it will most likely take longer than planned. Moreover, e-commerce organizations get absolutely none of the headless benefits until the migration is completed.

Under this scenario, the existing site is kept on life support for the months or years the development team is focused on building the new headless frontend. And even if a development team hits all its key project dates and goes live, it’s still hard. There may still be many capabilities and features that can’t be included in that initial launch, which leaves the newly created frontend in catch-up mode.

You Can Go Halfway

The good news is that going headless does not have to be all or nothing. It’s possible to achieve many of the benefits of going headless without taking the full plunge.  Here’s how:

• Don’t take on more than you can handle. Especially in the current market, where every second counts and organizations likely have fewer engineers than they did last year, expecting a resource-strapped development team to rebuild an entire frontend is unrealistic, and would likely take too much time and upfront investment.
• Implement a supplemental strategy where, instead of replacing a monolithic frontend in one big project, the organization chooses one critical headless capability at a time to add to the frontend. For instance, instead of replacing the whole site, e-commerce marketers could replace an element in product pages that isn't helping shoppers convert to buyers. This cumulative approach focuses the team on achieving meaningful short-term milestones. In this way, an e-commerce organization can continuously add new capabilities and progressively evolve from a monolithic system until the entire backend is segmented into microservices or different best-of-breed vendors. This approach also means that business value will be delivered throughout the migration.
• Consider dedicated frontend composition platforms that implement additive strategies while allowing all business users - including developers, marketers, and designers - to help bring new functionality to the site. This can help overstretched development teams avoid becoming a bottleneck so the broader organization can deliver new experiences to the existing site more quickly. Reducing handoffs and eliminating the build step enables quicker content creation, which allows for more experimentation and, ultimately, a faster path to optimization and revenue-driving conversion improvements.

Open the Doors to Experimentation

Let’s look at a common scenario. If an organization’s team does a quick analysis of its product pages and evaluates where the most underutilized real estate is on those pages, they will be able to translate that deficit into an opportunity and make that real estate more effective. For example, on many product pages, there are large swaths of whitespace and then a related product carousel tucked down at the bottom of the page where customers rarely venture. In this case, moving those related products up on the page is a good way to drive up average order value.

In addition, the organization can choose to take it a step further and turn that related products carousel into a "build a bundle" offer where shoppers can attach three additional items to purchase all at once - with just one click. Ultimately, the organization can quickly and easily test anything - including the page layout and adaptive experience options, without needing weeks of lead time for planning and development. It's all about picking one’s opportunities and providing the desired experience built with the technology that gets you the shortest time to value and responsibly balances business success.

The decision to go headless (or not) certainly does not need to be an all-or-nothing event. It’s possible to go halfway or to dip your toes in just a little bit. Don’t try to do everything at once; instead, focus on doing a little at a time, and take advantage of new design tools that unleash frontend creativity and agility while transitioning to your ideal e-commerce stack at a gradual pace.

Ryan Breen is Chief Technology Officer at Zmags and a CMS Critic contributor.