COVID-19 accelerated changes within the ecommerce world. This includes a 43% increase in ecommerce sales in 2020. With increased attention to their digital brands, many furniture retailers are struggling with the often conflicting objectives of streamlined operations and providing unique customer experiences.
The operating efficiency of using an ecommerce platform can come with limitations in designing online customer experiences. That’s why some businesses are turning to a headless commerce strategy to fully express their brands online and keep up with customer expectations.
Furniture businesses can benefit from adopting headless commerce, but the transition should not be taken lightly, as it requires both the potentially complex tasks of data integration and business logic definition, as well as “ground up” development, maintenance, and enhancement of digital shopping experiences.
Below, we’ll take a look at what headless commerce is, as well as how its eventual use can benefit furniture companies.
Headless commerce is a new way of delivering ecommerce experiences, requiring two broad groups of functionality:
Back-end components do a lot of the heavy lifting of ecommerce, extracting, interpreting, and collecting ecommerce data. These components generally include:
Front-end components (the presentation layer) display this data and logic to shoppers in a storefront. These components include:
Traditionally, the front-end and back-end of ecommerce architecture are handled by a single, highly interconnected application, where changing one may change the other. This can make what seems like a simple design change to the front end have unintended data or logic consequences to the back end, slowing down development or introducing risks of bugs or defects.
With headless commerce, the front-end is separated from the back-end. Each is a self-contained application, communicating through standard application programming interfaces (APIs).
The back end provides the data to power shopping experiences via these APIs while the front-end uses the information to provide a custom shopping experience.
A presentation layer that’s discrete from the logic that powers it means there is increased agility to make design and user experience changes and adapt to the needs of your customers. Presentation changes can be made quickly without the worry or delay of unintended back-end complications.
Headless commerce is more reliable than developing your own traditional front-end and back-end connected website. With a traditional architecture, if one change is made, it could impact the entire system, making it difficult to reverse unwanted changes.
With an API, you can make front-end changes without affecting the operational code. This approach is also more resilient to cybersecurity threats than traditional development.
Headless implementations allow for complete flexibility in front-end design, which can generate unique, differentiated experiences. But, this also puts all user experience responsibility with you, which requires a great deal of time and expertise.
Moving towards a headless commerce approach could be the optimal strategy for your furniture business to meet ever-evolving customer needs.
However, going headless can be a major strain on your business resources. It is a complicated model that requires a great deal of in-house expertise and management. Particularly in industries with unique and complex requirements, headless commerce can be a challenging approach.
Blueport provides an option to migrate to a headless option over time. It starts with a Blueport implementation that includes a Blueport website that gets you up and running immediately with all the benefits of our proven data integration and business logic, built for leading furniture retailers like you.
Your Blueport website will be entirely powered by APIs - to put it simply, this is a headless implementation that comes with a head. Down the road, if you choose to take more of the front-end design and management in house, you can replace your Blueport website with your own while still making use of the proven back-end integration, tooling, business logic and APIs of your existing Blueport implementation.
It’s a future-proof approach: The immediate benefits of a best-in-class Blueport website, and the flexibility down the road to build your own custom site using the Blueport back-end you already have.
Blueport offers a headless ecommerce platform that allows you to immediately launch the omnichannel experience you’ve always envisioned for your shoppers, with the assurance of a future-proof architecture that can evolve with your business. To discover more about which furniture ecommerce software is right for you, explore our Buyer’s Guide.