Headless: Role of Customer Journey

Do you know the most significant trouble that an eCommerce retailer usually faces today? Is it sales, or is it customer acquisition?

Undoubtedly, these two factors are also crucial for an eCommerce business. However, something influences these and other factors too, and that is customer experience.

Today’s technological advancement and changing customer demands ask the eCommerce companies to derive the business solutions that help them stay in front of the competition. To excel in their respective industries, they need to focus on the new opportunities and strategies based on the omnichannel approach. Since the ultimate goal is to enhance the customer experience, companies do anything and everything to make their customers happy and satisfied.

That’s why companies strive to find a potential solution that helps them offer their customers the best experience possible. And when it comes to a potential solution, nothing could be better than the headless approach.

It is one of the state-of-the-art techniques many eCommerce retailers have equipped with to make their customers’ journeys seamless. This informational piece will introduce you to headless commerce and guide you through the ways it can help in optimizing the customer experience.

Why is the eCommerce World Going Headless?

The business world is full of new expectations and experiences. There is hardly anything that remains the same; time has the power to change almost everything. When the earth itself isn’t stable, how can you expect customers’ expectations to never change?

The primary reason for headless commerce to come into existence is to enhance the way eCommerce businesses take place. The headless solutions brought the freedom that every marketer always wanted. But the question is, how does this marketing freedom help in transforming the customer journey? To understand this, let’s first understand what headless commerce is

So, if you try to understand the term literally, headless commerce will be a kind of trading or business without a head. Well, it’s right, but you might not know what the head is. Therefore, technically speaking, when the front-end and the back-end of an eCommerce application get separated, and both of these ends become independent of each other, the eCommerce platform will be ‘headless.’

It means when you perform some change on the back-end, it won’t affect the front-end and vice versa. Considering that the front-end is the head of the eCommerce system, its separation from the back-end makes it headless.

However, it doesn’t mean that these ends are two independent and individual systems with separate identities. They are still connected with the application programming interfaces (APIs), but the developers can now work separately on the two ends.

The customers’ demands constantly change, and they always wanted a smooth shopping experience on multiple devices and through different touchpoints. The technologists and developers searched for potential solutions to offer them a seamless omnichannel experience that traditional platforms struggle to provide. And that’s why headless commerce came into existence, and eCommerce retailers started adopting this new approach. According to a survey conducted by WP engine, approximately 92% of the respondents believe that the headless approach helps in improving online experience for the users. Pretty impressive, right?

Advantages of Headless Solution to eCommerce Retailers

From enhancing customer experience to saving time and money, headless solutions offer a plethora of benefits to eCommerce businesses. In the case of headless commerce, since the two heads (front-end and back-end) are independent, you don’t need to modify the back-end to improve the interface for the users. It also helps speed up the development process and ensure that the changes do not take time to implement. Some of the significant benefits of headless solutions for eCommerce businesses are:

• Offers More Flexibility

See, in these times when the customers’ needs are on the turn, it becomes crucial to adapt to the changes and adjust with them. Therefore, eCommerce retailers need a flexible system that offers flexibility, and the headless solution is perfect for this.

For instance, earlier, online customers only needed the product specifications to decide whether they wanted the product or not. However, today, they want the product images, reviews, and even a featured video that describes how the product actually is. The more interactive the user interface is, the better.

• Reduces Cost and Saves Money

It is pretty clear that you will automatically save money when there is a reduction in the development cost. But the question is how headless solutions help in reducing the development cost.

Well, the answer is itself in the definition of the headless system you have learned above. When there is a separation between the front-end and back-end of an eCommerce system, you can work on the two sides separately. Therefore, you will no longer need to hire a dedicated team to work on both ends. Moreover, two different people can simultaneously work at different ends, saving the development time. Consequently, when the development time reduces, the development cost automatically lowers.

In addition to this, using the headless approach, you can target the right audience and work accordingly to fulfill their exact needs. As a result, you don’t have to waste time and money on things that might be of no use to your targeted customers.

• Lowers the Workload of Your Employees

With conventional eCommerce methods, your back-end developers have to focus on the front-end and ensure that the interface engages enough visitors. It used to increase their workload, and they got no time to find innovative and interactive ideas for other tasks.

However, the case is different with headless commerce. Separate developers can do the front-end and back-end tasks in a headless approach. Therefore, the front-end designers can focus on creating an interactive and highly-engaging UI, and the back-end developers can devote their time nurturing the back-end system. With this, creative engineers can make the best use of their capabilities and utilize their imagination in building beautiful interfaces. Subsequently, it reduces the work pressure on the employees, ensures a stress-free working environment, and opens their scope of innovation.

• Lowers the Workload of Your Employees

From the starting of this informational piece, one thing that is constantly conveyed here is that customer experience is the key to the door to your success. Headless architecture offers developers and marketers more freedom to personalize the UI and deliver a seamless experience to the shoppers.

But how?

Well, headless solutions provide microservices that ensure to maintain and provide consistent data on all the digital channels – be it online or offline. As a result, the customers will have the same experience and get the same information across multiple channels. Content consistency enhances the overall user experience and leads to customer satisfaction.

Furthermore, the back-end system of a headless architecture consists of relevant and accurate information which marketers can use to enhance the personalization. According to a survey report by Accenture, 91% of customers are more likely to purchase products from brands that offer personalized recommendations. Customer personalization also helps in recommending specific products to the customers based on their interests and preferences, increasing the chances of sales.

How Does a Headless Solution Influence the Customer Journey?

A few years back, almost all the businesses out there were using the conventional, non-headless eCommerce architecture. It isn’t like systems were not generating revenue or had fewer customers; people were shopping then, too. However, when the time changed and new technologies emerged in the background, the customers’ expectations also took a turn.

The traditional approaches were not capable enough to provide a seamless experience. In fact, they had a disjointed experience when the product prices, offers, and inventory are not synchronized in real-time on different platforms.

Moreover, with the siloed information and no transparency, the customer journey wasn’t smooth. Neither the customers could access their account information on a smartphone, nor could they complete a transaction on the same device. Not everyone could carry their desktops or personal computers with them, and having no accessibility through other devices made the customer journey challenging.

What Changes Does Headless Architecture Bring?

The headless architecture opens the doors to resolve all these issues with a customer-centric approach, improved personalization, and enhanced omnichannel experience. It became a perfect solution, especially for the eCommerce businesses that:

• Are content-driven
• Wants to implement customer personalization
• Have omnichannel touchpoints
• Looking to deliver a seamless experience to the customers

Here are the ways through which headless commerce optimizes the customer journey:

• The interface designs are updated instantly at all touchpoints.

With the headless approach, when your UI development team makes any modifications in the interface design, it gets instantly reflected everywhere. It means no matter through what device users access your eCommerce portal, the same design with consistent information will be delivered to them.

Moreover, it also helps marketers quickly change marketing strategies based on the new trends and opportunities as they come along. They can also add new blogs, microsites, and web stores that link to a single eCommerce business platform. Apart from the REST API used to connect the front-end and back-end of the system, developers can also integrate other APIs and elements easily to accelerate the performance.

• Build a personalized customer experience

Gone are the days when the customers used to access only the official website to get information about the brand and its products. Today, a business needs to take care of all the channels through which a customer can reach the brand, be it social media, mobile application, or any other platform.

You can quickly build, design, and modify the interface with headless solutions without disturbing the back end. Your development and marketing team can also develop multiple front-ends attached to a single back-end so that all the customer touchpoints will deliver the same information.

Moreover, the back-end of an eCommerce system has all the customer information related to past purchases and search history that helps filter and provides recommended products to the customers. It is crucial as 56% of online customers are more likely to return to a brand that offers product recommendations.

Deliver Consistent Integrated Experience

As already mentioned, the REST API integrated into a headless architecture gathers the information from the commerce platform and directs it to all its associated channels. Since adding front-ends has minimal impact on the back-end system, customers will have a consistent experience across all the customer touchpoints.

Highly engaging and interactive interfaces save time and reduce customer acquisition costs (CACs) as they automatically attract customers due to seamless experience. Consequently, it will lead to an enhancement in the customer experience and increase sales & revenue.

Get additional security with headless.

Another helpful thing about a headless system that makes it better than the traditional approach is enhanced security. In traditional eCommerce systems, a slight change in one element can affect the entire system. Due to this, if there is a security breach in one component, the whole system can come into danger.

However, headless systems do not work like that. For instance, the APIs offered content are more impenetrable to cyber threats and malicious activities. Moreover, the CMS functionality is not directly exposed to everyone. It is securely hidden under different layers of code to prevent trespassing.

Wrapping Up

Today, the market landscape has changed completely. Customers want more and more convenience and a better experience while shopping online. They don’t want vagueness while buying their favorite products and like everything in a few clicks and taps.

It imposes pressure on eCommerce retailers to find a potential solution to resolve these issues and offer a smooth shopping experience. And guess what, after reading all the above information, what do you think could be a better option than a headless solution?

Its benefits – endless, and its results – outstanding. And best of all, it makes everyone happy in the end, be it you or your customers.

So, what are you waiting for? If you also want to transform your traditional CMS into future-driven and customer-centric decoupled architecture, consult our professional web development company today! Build a best-in-class eCommerce experience with maximized compatibility, flexibility, and efficiency for your customers.