Agility and the Headless Commerce Debate: Making a Decision for the Whole Business
So, you are considering headless commerce and have made your way through the talks, videos and articles but still have not decided what to do? The arguments for transitioning to headless commerce are numerous and touch several domains. It is useful to categorize the value proposition by the segments they impact:
Providers — Those who business is the building, delivery and/or maintenance of digital commerce platforms.
Consumers — Those who subscribe to commerce platforms and/or services as a vehicle to grow their core business.
Users — Those who are immersed in a digital commerce experience.
The return on investment in headless commerce is different for each group above. As agility is perhaps the most often cited benefit of headless commerce, let’s use that as an example.
For Providers, Agility is all about Delivery
For providers, agility is measured by how quickly they can deliver something new. It’s essential for keeping pace with competitive demands and meeting the market where it’s going. There is no question that a headless strategy will support agility for digital commerce providers. They can develop features in parallel and deliver them to market faster API first.
Providers who do include a “head” must be able to release UI updates independently of their back end. This allows two separate streams of work and the opportunity to tune the processes that drive design, develop, test and release as frequently as possible. Need more agility? Keep dividing work-streams until the required coordination between work-streams threatens their independence. Indeed, you’ve heard this argument made for microservice adoption and it’s a good one, if you are in the business of building and maintaining core backend services. If your organization has an agile delivery program you brag about at conferences but opted out of headless commerce, you should be writing an article about that. On the other hand, if your delivery organization is riding a barrel over a waterfall and you think going headless will make you agile it’s time to get a second barrel!
Provider agility is important to their customers too, but digital commerce consumers need to be agile in the consumption of those new features. This may be easier for an organization with a large mature front-end development team to support than one which farms out its design and IT. The latter may be able to adopt new features with greater agility by leveraging a well tooled front-end framework.
For Consumers, Agility is all about Operations
Alas, adopting emerging vendor features is but a small part of consumer agility. I’m reminded of a John Deere ad, “It’s not how fast you mow, it’s how well you mow fast!” For digital commerce consumers, agility should be measured by how quickly one can make a positive impact. A headless strategy may have both positive and negative impacts on various aspects of running one’s business, depending on how its supported, organized and staffed. Aside from adopting new provider features, those running digital commerce touchpoints should consider agility in areas like managing their assortments, pricing, marketing, analytics and other high frequency tasks. Coordinating changes in these areas are typically easier when tooling is present and unified so a headless strategy that includes independent services from disparate systems should also include support for frequent business operations. Undoubtedly, organizations with highly customized administrative processes will gain agility by building bespoke tools that operate across multiple headless systems if vendor tooling is unavailable or ill-suited. Most will save some time and effort by using the tools at hand until they can, augmenting the gap with custom tools and dashboards over time.
Less frequent, yet no less important to consider are: spinning up a new brand or microsite, the adoption of new payment and fulfillment models, expansion into new channels and markets, integrating value-added services and developing experiences for new touchpoints and devices. Digital commerce consumers who have successfully adopted agile delivery of their user experiences will surely be able to smoothly leverage the headless commerce value proposition when it’s time to address such concerns. However, that does not mean those who haven’t will be denied the opportunity to innovate. Microtransactions on smart devices, frictionless returns and last mile delivery are not the protected domain of headless practitioners. One might argue that a business’s agility in developing sound operational and go-to-market strategies for innovative adoption is more important than how fast they execute. Consider how often these things are done, how much impact they have on the business and its consumers and what kind of agility is required across the whole program rather than just development.
For Users, Agility is about Gratification
We want what we want when and where we want it. Most of us do not want to endure an elaborate product configuration just to find a store I can visit to see it and most of us would rather not walk through a maze of products we are not interested in to see it once we get there. We expect our privacy to be protected but assume call centers and points-of-sale know all about whatever it is we are doing whether we are doing it on our phone, bike, wearable device or the outdated PC in the hotel lobby. We have goals and we expect an experience that support their pursuit on whichever head we are facing at the time.
What does that have to do with headless commerce? Well, insomuch as you are doing what you need to well, not much at all! There are many articles about the benefits of “going headless,” and some make note of end-user benefits but those are rather tenuous… those arguments may be made to the extent of the ability to successfully deliver a great user interface — upon which, a great digital experience, relies — depends on one’s headless strategy. However, it remains extremely challenging to relate, much less quantify, the impact of “going headless,” or any other architectural strategy for that matter, on metrics like traffic, stickiness, average order value and conversion rates.
Last Thoughts
So, you are considering headless commerce, having read one more opinionated article but still have not decided what to do? The very first thing you need to do is understand who you are and what you are trying to do. I submit, if you are a provider, you must support it and if you are an end-user, you probably don’t care. If you are already doing it, you should be exploring how to do it with greater agility. But if you’re not, my advice is: don’t ignore it. The shoulders of headless commerce: continuous design, development, integration and delivery of well-orchestrated services are worth exploring and can boost your agility regardless of where you land on headless commerce. When considering your road map, and where to spend your development dollars, ask the following questions:
What will “move the needle” and help me grow my business?
What is preventing me doing these things with greater agility?
How will I evaluate the cost to the business against the gain?
Remember, great products, great marketing and great experiences remain the most impactful drivers of the metrics that count the most. Fix what’s broken there first and you’ll likely find the headless commerce debate sorts itself out on the way.
