There is hardly any person who doesn’t know about ecommerce or hasn’t heard of it yet. The entire world relies on the ecommerce sector for their needs, whether it is any electronic goods or fashion accessory. It is, after all, one of the revolutionary, fast-paced, and hypercompetitive industries worldwide. Every day, at least three to more businesses add their ecommerce website to the search engines. So, it is quite evident that the ecommerce industry is not only versatile but also knows no bounds when it comes to existing companies and businesses and the consumer base.
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Since the ecommerce industry is advancing rapidly and adopting multifarious technologies for improvement, relying on obsolete methodologies won’t do any good. Perhaps this is what fueled the need to have an ecommerce website or web app architecture that is the epitome of agility, flexibility, scalability, productivity, and expandability. That’s where headless commerce comes into play. Being a nascent software development architecture, it is yet not popular worldwide. But it surely provides businesses the edge needed to supersede the competition and become one of the industry’s aces.
Monolithic architecture: The existing but obsolete methodology
Almost every six ecommerce websites or web apps that you see presently active on the search engines are based on the monolithic architecture. It has indeed become obsolete despite being in use. But what exactly is this monolithic architecture and why has it been rendered as non-functional concerning the ecommerce industry. These two questions are the one that need to be answered first before you get indulged with headless commerce.
Every website has two parts:
1. Frontend or the user interface that you directly see and interact with on the server. It is further made of various components, like multimedia, web pages, dropdowns, and so on.
2. Backend is the business logic layer that controls all the functional workflows of the website. From calculating the total cart value to displaying products based on the selected filter options, it is the backend modules responsible.
In a monolithic architecture, these two layers are integrated with another. There is no scope of third-party interactive components or a middle layer. As a result, all the components work based on a centralized workflow and are highly dependent on one another. If a change needs to be done in a single component or functional workflow, assessing its impact on the integrated workflows and components’ behavior becomes extremely difficult for any developer. Furthermore, the monolith behaves as a single unit during deployment, which means that if a change needs to be deployed for the frontend, the entire website or web app has to be taken down from the server.
Reasons for the failure of monolithic architecture in today’s ecommerce market
Given the fact that the ecommerce market is advancing with galloping speed, the monolithic architecture has somehow failed to meet the expectations and adapt accordingly. To make it clearer, we have listed some of the failure causes below that will illustrate why the monolith is no longer an ideal choice for ecommerce websites and web apps.
Centralized workflow: All the workflows pertaining to the monolithic architecture are centralized. There is no segmentation, which is why managing them becomes quite difficult at a faster rate.
Singularity: Another major reason that led to the downfall of monolithic architecture is singularity. The entire backend and frontend layers are integrated to behave as a single unit. As a result, making any modification in a specific component or behavioral workflow is not possible.
Rigidity: Due to the interdependencies of the layers, the website or web app is highly rigid. In other words, they cannot function properly if new changes need to be deployed rapidly. Furthermore, the risks are too great to comprehend when it comes to adopting new technologies within the monolith.
Longer time to market: When any new module or component needs to be developed and deployed, developers require a long time duration to complete. This is because the integrated and centralized codebase needs multiple changes, which further increases the time of market.
Non-scalable: There is no doubt that the monolithic architecture lacks the level of scalability and flexibility one would expect from an ecommerce website or web app of the modern times. Whether it is deploying changes on the go or dealing with fast-paced consumer demands, the monolithic architecture is not the ideal choice to begin with.
From monolithic to headless: A much-needed transition for ecommerce
As discussed in the above section, the monolithic architecture has numerous shortcomings. These not only impact the overall business revenues and brand image in a negative manner but also prevent from integrating consumer-centric approaches. Furthermore, the high level of rigidity makes it nearly impossible to scale the components or workflows on the go.
To address these drawbacks, businesses need to adopt a new development architecture, the headless commerce. The term here signifies decoupling of frontend and backend layers and introducing an additional middle API layer to sustain and streamline interactions. In other words, the backend and frontend modules are separated from one another through headless commerce. To maintain the communication seamlessly between these two layers, several APIs are deployed that are lightweight, scalable, fast-paced, and responsive.
A typical headless ecommerce website or web app will have the following components:
- Frontend layers for product catalogs, user account pages, checkout pages, and more
- Authentication modules
- Payment gateways and modules
- CMS or Content Management Service module
- Email and push notification module
- ERP or Enterprise Resource Management and CRM or Customer Relationship Management modules
- Plugins and third-party integrations
- Distributed database
How headless commerce gives businesses the edge needed to supersede competition?
Below explained are a few benefits of headless architecture that every ecommerce business can leverage to ace the competition and emerge victorious.
1. Omnichannel
Nowadays, online shopping isn’t just restricted to a single type of device or medium. For instance, people use laptops, mobiles, and other devices to access the ecommerce websites and applications. Furthermore, they rely on different shopping channels, like social media, websites, online forums, marketplaces, and many more. As an ecommerce business of the current era, it is imperative to ensure the user experience is seamless and uniform across all the integrated shopping channels. This is where headless commerce comes into play. It offers an omnichannel presence to the businesses, ensuring they can provide an excellent customer experience across different shopping channels irrespective of the devices, OS platforms, or software.
2. Decoupled architecture
Unlike the monolithic architecture, headless commerce follows a decoupled architecture where the frontend and backend layers are separated and controlled independently of one another. These layers interact and exchange data through service APIs. The JSON requests are triggered when users take any action at the frontend. Accordingly, the requests trigger the respected backend workflow and generate the accurate results. Due to the decoupling of the two layers, the ecommerce website or web app processes user actions much faster and with more accuracy. Furthermore, it allows the software to offer an enhanced user experience throughout the shopping journey.
3. Modularity
The backend and frontend layers in the headless commerce architecture are highly modular. In other words, they are segmented into different modules controlled and managed through microservices and APIs. Due to modularity, it becomes easier to manage the functional workflows independently without affecting other operations. For instance, if you want to update the shopping cart feature, the headless commerce architecture will ensure no other functional workflow is negatively affected due to the modifications. Furthermore, you can expand and reuse the components independently owing to their modular behavior.
4. Scalability and flexibility
Another reason to invest in headless frontend and backend architecture is due its high level of scalability and flexibility. In terms of flexibility, you can make any new feature introduction or change an existing functionality without worrying about negatively impacting the overall platform. Since each module is handled through a specific codebase or process service, developers can make specific changes without having to deal with the entire codebase or all the other layers. As for scalability, you can customize the website or web app as per the consumer demands and market trends to ensure the user experience can be enhanced. The modular architecture allows on-the-go scalability, thereby paving ways to sync the ecommerce platform with your target audience.
5. Faster time to market
Ideally, it takes months to develop the beta version of an ecommerce platform following the monolithic architecture. Furthermore, any change integration requires additional time due to integrated deployment schedules. So, the time to market is quite large, something which is not acceptable in this fast-paced industry. To overcome this issue, businesses can rely on headless commerce. Its modularity and flexibility allow developers to come up with a fully developed beta version within weeks and deploy the modules independently into the live server. Additionally, developers can continue to work on other modules without taking down the website or web app from the server.
How headless architecture is related to microservices?
Often people use the terms microservices and headless interchangeably, assuming they are the same. However, technically, they aren’t, which is why recognizing the points of differences is imperative. Microservices development is a radical and modular approach where small modules are developed and deployed individually into the live server. Each module functions independently and is dedicated to handle a specific functional workflow. For instance, microservices will require different process services to trigger database queries or packages and process the datasets.
On the other hand, headless commerce platform simply means decoupling the frontend layer from the backend and establishing the communication using APIs. In other words, headless can be considered as a specific way to implement microservices development approach swiftly. To understand these two terms in a better way, we have illustrated a few differences below.
Decoupling: In headless commerce, only the frontend and backend layers are decoupled from one another. So, when we consider the individual layer, it acts as a singular unit. On the contrary, microservices allow decoupling of all the functional modules in both backend and frontend layers to establish a higher level of independence and scalability.
Design complexity: Headless architecture is easy to design when compared to microservices. This is because developers have a clear idea about separating the frontend from the backend layer and establishing communication through Rest APIs. However, in microservices, all the modules need to be separated, which is why developers need to plan accordingly and ensure the interdependency isn’t compromised by any means.
Management: Microservice-based modules are developed and deployed individually. They have separate workflows, which is why managing the modules in microservice-based websites or web apps is very difficult. On the other hand, headless commerce architecture is much easier to manage since the process services are clustered together within the same layer.
What are the common factors influencing the performance of headless commerce?
Even though headless CMS provides businesses an edge to overcome the challenges and streamline the functional workflows, its implementation isn’t easy. One wrong step and the entire website or web app concerning the ecommerce business will be negatively impacted. So, following are some of the factors to consider while developing and deploying the headless commerce architecture.
1. Understanding the business requirements is the primary step developers need to follow. If your business is not yet capable of handling the high-level headless commerce technicality, it is better to orchestrate strategies after analyzing the business requirements. This will give you a clear idea of how to develop and deploy the headless commerce components.
2. Choose a proper hosting server for the headless commerce website or web app. You can implement the principles of MACH where the headless website can be deployed and hosted on the on-premise and cloud servers easily.
3. Also, it should be noted here that the headless commerce architecture needs to be expandable and customizable. Therefore, developers should implement scalable and configurable codebases for further modifications.
Conclusion
With a headless commerce platform, you can easily streamline your ecommerce business, its workflows, and the overall performance. It not only decouples the frontend and backend layers from one another but paves ways for innovation, scalability, personalization, and customization. However, the headless architecture approach does come with numerous challenges that should be addressed from the very beginning. This will reduce the failure risks significantly and help you gain the trust of your target audience at a glance.
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