When and why should you consider switching to a headless CMS system for your e-commerce site?

For online vendors launching into an omni-channel approach, or wishing to provide good user experience on all digital devices, the headless CMS is the way to go so content can be managed in a centralised and independent manner.

Why opt for a headless CMS?

By separating the e-commerce site’s production from its content circulation, a headless CMS easily delivers all product and service offers to existing platforms and media – including mobile apps, marketplaces, virtual or augmented reality headsets or screens, digital kiosks and any other emerging environment.

Indeed, traditional e-commerce websites with just one technology for all their functionalities and offers may sometimes appear too rigid. This complicates any future changes to be made, to adapt to new consumption habits, as well as maintaining performance levels whenever external services require heavy synchronisation processes.

A headless e-commerce site does not suffer from these constraints. Adding, replacing or deleting services hosted by third-parties (ERP, CRM, WMS, PIM) is of course much simpler as content circulation is decoupled, and a micro-service architecture is set up (able to communicate via an API). The system thus offers higher performance levels, real-time access to data, and a richer panel of functionalities.

Which online vendors is a headless CMS best suited for?

Although a headless architecture offers a more attractive customer experience, it is not necessarily suitable to all e-vendors. For a very small or small company with a basic website containing just a few pages, this kind of investment would not be particularly useful.

On the other hand, a headless CMS is namely recommended for :

• e-commerce websites that include applications based on JavaScript frameworks, such as React, VueJS, or AngularJS.
• online stores looking for a suitable technique for publishing the same content on several different circulation platforms.
• websites created using a static site generator, that consider themselves too limited.