Ready to go headless with Shopify?

Headless commerce brings excellent benefits, especially in terms of site speed and user experience. E-commerce merchants are increasingly choosing this reliable commerce platform in their digital transformation journey to keep up with trends and customer expectations. In this article, we would like to introduce you to the Shopify headless e-commerce platform that will get your business ready to grow.

What is Shopify headless?

In general, headless commerce is commerce that applies a distinct piece of technology that powers the consumer-facing portion of your website. So, with Shopify headless, you can both have great supporting e-commerce functions and you can just use a different front end or “head” to power your customer-side webpage. 

Pros and Cons of the headless approach

Consumers today always shop online, so the need for speed at scale and across e-commerce platforms is more important than ever. Using headless commerce with Shopify gives you both the benefits of convenience and speed, but there are also a few disadvantages that your business needs to consider or look for alternatives.

Pros

With Shopify headless, your business will first have the opportunity to have more control over the customer experience. You will be able to customize and personalize more features you get on Shopify plug-and-play. What you need to do is mark your brand to stand out from the crowd by breaking free of the limitations of Shopify’s native themes and features, setting your visual merchandising apart. You can also redesign workflow and manage content at scale for more autonomy in managing your site. 

Besides, with this form of headless commerce, the sales speed of your business can be higher, which means more sales. So you can do anything to streamline the codebase that will help you convert.

Cons

Besides the benefits, going headless with Shopify also has disadvantages. First of all, when you don’t use Shopify’s built-in themes, some of your other apps will stop working, which will cost you an amount that could be important to your business. Because when your business builds the user interface of your Shopify store, you will have to create some custom codes unless Shopify API cannot recognize the third-party apps, and then it’s not supported. 

Additionally, this type of commerce requires a partner to take care of the technical aspects, so for your business and commerce teams to focus on sales and marketing, and assessment is required. This is quite time-consuming and costly.

How to go headless with Shopify?

To conduct Shopify headless, you can build with an agency. This will be a partner extremely well-versed in the management of websites. Your business websites will be easily integrated with Shopify’s backend and you will be well aware of all the potential risks and how to avoid them. Furthermore, the agency will give you advice at the design stage and know to turn your new concept into reality and get your website optimized.

Alternatively, you can use a frontend-as-a-service provider. Vendors will help you research, design, build, test, and deploy a wide range of platforms and custom APIs. You will receive a complete package with everything needed to manage your store. Instead of having to negotiate multiple layers of technology platforms, they help manage all of your commerce and marketing concerns through an intuitive Experience Manager. This eliminates a large number of daily technical problems.

Conclusion

Shopify headless has done a great job of performing powerful e-commerce functions like payment processing, inventory management, PCI compliance, and so on. Your business can fully use headless commerce with your existing Shopify store. Contact us if you need assistance in managing your store.