Headless commerce: a comprehensive technology overview, real-life examples & top tools

Modern commerce moves fast. Today’s customers are always switching between apps, devices, and channels and expect seamless experiences, personalized offers, and instant updates on every touchpoint. Meeting those requirements with solutions built upon traditional ecommerce architectures is increasingly difficult and costly.

To adapt to new channels and emerging customer needs, ecommerce businesses develop ecommerce solutions that support greater flexibility, speed, and personalization. Among modern architectures, headless commerce stands out as a leading approach for achieving these goals. This approach enables brands to rapidly iterate on customer-facing features and content and develop channel-specific frontend experiences without rebuilding the solution’s backend logic every time.

For brands scaling rapidly, operating globally, or managing multiple customer touchpoints, that kind of flexibility offers significant advantages in operational speed, stronger customer relationships, and market reach. But is headless commerce the right investment for your business? In this article, we break down how headless commerce works, provide its practical benefits, explore top headless ecommerce platforms, and share implementation tips to help you decide if this is the right solution for you.

Benefits of headless commerce

Headless commerce offers agility, control, and long-term adaptability, allowing businesses to design customer experiences specifically for each channel, scale across touchpoints, and innovate faster. Below are the key advantages this approach brings to modern ecommerce.

Accelerated deployment & innovation

With headless commerce architecture, development teams can test and deploy changes faster across desktop, mobile apps, and IoT touchpoints. It provides the following opportunities:

• Quickly respond to trends and results of the marketing campaign
• Launch website updates, A/B tests, or entirely new storefronts without waiting on backend changes
• Shorten iteration cycles and reduce time lost to inter-team coordination

Unconstrained experience design

Headless architecture empowers brands to create more unique digital experiences that are closely tailored to their business needs. This approach supports:

• The use of modern JavaScript frameworks like Vue or React for custom interfaces
• Channel-specific design, adapting the UX for web, mobile, kiosks, or wearable devices
• Seamless integration of headless CMS systems or digital experience platforms to deliver rich, content-led customer journeys

Growth-readiness & adaptability

The headless commerce approach supports long-term business growth by making it easier to adapt frontends to new channels and expand the backend part without replatforming. This way, retailers benefit from:

• The possibility of gradual expansion across geographies and customer segments
• The ability to run multiple storefronts for different brands, audiences, or regions from one backend
• Easier adoption of new technologies like AR, voice commerce, or social selling integrations 

Developer & IT teams efficiency

Headless architecture saves IT staff time and improves the company’s overall tech agility. With this approach, teams can:

• Work in parallel without cross-dependencies
• Streamline software maintenance by updating only selected parts of the system
• Reduce deployment risks through service isolation

Improved user experience

With headless commerce architecture, brands can ensure faster website performance, which allows businesses to:

• Enhance customer satisfaction through optimized experiences
• Improve load times with lightweight frontends
• Boost conversion rates and lower bounce rates

Best headless commerce platforms

Here are the top providers from the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Commerce that offer ecommerce platforms with robust headless capabilities, each presenting unique strengths in performance, flexibility, and scalability.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides a headless commerce solution suitable for both B2C and B2B companies, along with a robust set of headless APIs to connect various touchpoints and business systems.

Core capabilities:

• B2C storefront toolkit, with features like multilingual support, optimized checkout, and mobile-first UX
• B2B commerce functionality, including the management of complex bulk orders and contract pricing
• AI-powered automation, personalization of product recommendations, predictive search, and dynamic product sorting
• Multi-site and multi-currency support
• Out-of-the-box storefront templates and prebuilt marketing campaign and promotion modules
• 99.99% historical uptime and API response caching for robust performance
• Compliance with global and industry-specific regulations, including GDPR, CCPA, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and others
• A powerful, multi-layered security framework encompassing an infrastructure powered by internet security technologies (e.g., TLS, firewalls), stringent network and data protection protocols, continuous data replication, regular threat assessments, and 24/7 service monitoring

Differentiators:

• Native integration with the Salesforce ecosystem
• Deep AI capabilities enabled through Einstein, Salesforce’s proprietary artificial intelligence technology

Shopify

Shopify is an ecommerce platform offering a headless architecture and built-in developer tools, helping brands create differentiated digital experiences without developing them from scratch.

Core capabilities:

• A flexible,  API-first layer that connects frontends with Shopify’s commerce backend
• Support for composable commerce, enabling businesses to easily integrate and change store components
• Support for subscriptions, gift cards, and complex discount rules
• Features for omnichannel selling
• Country-specific pricing and tax calculation
• Multi-currency and translation options
• Data encryption, access controls, fraud prevention, PCI compliance, and proactive threat monitoring to safeguard stores and customer data

Differentiators:

• Hydrogen, React-based framework, offering commerce-optimized components, TypeScript support, and prebuilt templates
• Oxygen, a global edge-based hosting solution ensuring low-latency performance

Adobe Commerce (Magento)

Adobe Commerce is an API-first ecommerce platform that helps B2C and B2B commerce companies deliver scalable, personalized experiences. It provides a headless architecture and supports complex buyer journeys and high-volume transactions, enabling brands to streamline their operations and maximize revenue.

Core capabilities:

• Headless storefront development using GraphQL APIs and Adobe App Builder
• Prebuilt and custom storefront components
• Visual content editor
• AI-powered product recommendations and search
• Real-time customer experience personalization via Adobe Real-Time CDP and Journey Optimizer
• Multi-site and multi-language support with shared or localized catalogs
• Unified platform for B2C and B2B commerce, allowing users to manage both types of businesses from one interface
• B2B commerce capabilities, including personalized pricing, quick ordering, approval workflows, account hierarchies, flexible payment options, and self-service portals
• Low-code tools to enable rapid development of digital experiences within a composable commerce architecture
• Prebuilt connectors for ERP, CRM, tax, shipping, and OMS platforms
• Strong data encryption, PCI v4.0 certification, integrated fraud protection, continuous threat monitoring, and automated patching and vulnerability management

Differentiators:

• Deep Adobe Experience Cloud integration for omnichannel personalization and journey orchestration
• Edge Delivery Services for fast storefront performance

commercetools

commercetools is a cloud-native, API-first commerce platform that enables flexibility, scalability, and rapid innovation. It offers B2B, omnichannel, and personalization features to create custom commerce experiences across any channel.

Core capabilities:

• Runs on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure with built-in support for containers, microservices, and high availability
• Offers fully customizable product types, variants, attributes, and relationships to support any catalog structure
• Comes with 300+ prebuilt APIs and full GraphQL support for tailored integrations and business logic
• Ensures real-time synchronization of shopping carts across digital touchpoints and buyer accounts
• Offers AI-powered capabilities like recommendations, content personalization, and predictions
• Provides B2B-ready functionality, including support for quotes, approval flows, purchase orders, business unit hierarchies, and role-based permissions
• Supports auto-scaling
• Provides end-to-end data encryption, SOC II, ISO/IEC 27001 certifications, and WPA2/AES-256 protection at the network level

Differentiators:

• Encrypted, geo-separated backups
• Adherence to MACH principles (microservices, API-first, cloud-native, headless)

SAP Commerce Cloud

SAP Commerce Cloud is a modular, enterprise-grade platform that supports B2C, B2B, and B2B2C commerce models. The solution helps businesses centralize product data, deliver consistent experiences, and support high-volume transactions involving multiple currencies.

Core capabilities:

• Support for composable architecture
• Automated returns and inventory updates
• AI-powered product recommendations, automated tagging, content generation, search results personalization based on user behavior and preferences, and conversational AI agents for customer support
• WYSIWYG editor, product content management tools, and drag-and-drop widgets for simplified website content creation and management
• Multilingual and multi-currency support
• Campaign performance analysis through visual dashboards, multidimensional data filtering, and ML-based strategy refinement
• Natural language query handling
• Comprehensive security mechanisms, including SSO, OAuth 2.0 support, granular user roles, PCI compliance, data encryption, user consent mechanisms, secure network configurations, real-time threat monitoring, and regular security updates

Differentiators:

• Built-in SAP ecosystem integration
• Visual search capability

Spryker

Spryker is a modular, cloud-native solution for building ecommerce sites, enabling flexibility and scalability to meet complex business requirements. 

Core capabilities:

• Support for a composable architecture
• Headless API-first approach with GLUE API for various frontend touchpoints, such as mobile apps, voice assistants, IoT devices, and smart shelves
• Out-of-the-box B2B capabilities, e.g., procurement streamlining and budget management
• Built-in B2C capabilities, e.g., product catalog, CMS, as well as pricing, cart, checkout, order, and inventory management
• Enterprise Marketplace capabilities, such as merchant onboarding and product, offer, order, and fulfillment management
• Multi-store, multi-currency, and international tax management
• Full-site textual search with multi-language support
• Audit logs for tracking system user activities
• Comprehensive security mechanisms, including data encryption, access controls, security audits, and two-step authentication

Differentiators:

• Built on independent, composable modules or Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs)
• Integrates Amazon QuickSight for business intelligence

Real-life headless commerce examples

The adoption of headless commerce is a common way brands achieve flexibility, scalability, and faster innovation. Below are examples of companies that have implemented headless architectures to address such challenges as rigid legacy systems, slow website performance, and limited content control and gained multiple benefits due to this transformation in return.

Ditto Music

Ditto Music, a UK-based music distribution platform, helps over 200,000 independent artists release music across 160+ digital streaming services. To modernize their legacy system and serve a growing user base, Ditto transitioned to a headless solution powered by AWS microservices. This enabled the company to roll out new features, such as royalty splits and publishing rights management capabilities, faster while delivering more flexible and scalable experiences for both creators and administrators.

Under Armour

Under Armour, a global athletic apparel brand, sought to improve their online operations and customers’ ecommerce experience. The company aimed to centralize operations, scale rapidly, boost site performance, and launch a loyalty program.

Moving from a traditional ecommerce platform, they adopted a headless Salesforce Commerce Cloud solution. Thanks to this change, Under Armour can now more easily personalize customer experiences based on shopper location, purchasing history, activity, and workout logs.

Burrow

Burrow, a direct-to-consumer furniture company, experienced rapid business growth and needed a more scalable ecommerce platform with greater customization capabilities to support their marketing efforts. They implemented a headless commerce solution, utilizing BigCommerce for the backend and a custom headless CMS, Hygraph, for the frontend. This setup allowed them to frequently update content, manage complex product variations, and create tailored customer experiences.

Black Diamond Equipment

Black Diamond Equipment, an outdoor gear brand, struggled to display its content effectively and faced high development costs with their previous monolithic website. They adopted a headless strategy, implementing the BigCommerce open SaaS platform.

This provided their marketing team with direct control over content and site management, improving the brand’s online representation and reducing ownership costs. The headless implementation also enabled the customization of messaging and merchandising for different international markets and athlete programs.

Combat Corner

Combat Corner, a martial arts equipment manufacturer, faced significant performance and usability issues with their previous ecommerce platform, which also hindered their expansion into the B2C market. Seeking a flexible and modern solution, they replatformed to BigCommerce and implemented a headless solution.

This transition dramatically improved site management, speed, and design flexibility. Combat Corner now efficiently manages content and inventory, delivers faster cross-device experiences, and automates its backend processes.

Tips for implementing a headless commerce solution

Headless commerce enables greater speed, flexibility, and personalization, but realizing these benefits requires a well-thought-out implementation strategy. Below are four tips for deploying a solution based on the headless commerce architecture to achieve both short-term improvements and long-term growth.

Adopt a phased launch strategy

A controlled, phased approach allows the project team to validate their assumptions about the functioning and impact of a headless solution early on and adjust it based on real-life user behavior. Begin by launching a limited set of features, like product display, shopping cart, checkout, and payment processing, as a minimum viable product. Also, enable minimal integrations with essential backend systems for inventory and order processing to make sure that basic ecommerce operations can run smoothly.

Once the MVP is live, analyze real customer interactions and website performance to gradually expand to more advanced capabilities like bundled offers, localized storefronts, or progressive web apps after stabilizing core workflows.

Plan for seamless integrations

When developing a store using a headless architecture, a critical step is ensuring seamless integration with your existing ERP, CRM, logistics, and other systems to support smooth ecommerce operations. Whether you’re opting for a headless platform or custom development, focus on solutions that offer robust connectivity. Specifically, prioritize vendors that provide prebuilt connectors or a strong API ecosystem to easily plug in new platforms or frameworks.

Prioritize high-performance infrastructure

To ensure the strong performance of your headless commerce system, build a resilient and scalable infrastructure, optimizing both backend components and frontend content delivery.

As such, architect the backend for elasticity, enabling automatic scaling during traffic peaks. Strategies for ensuring robust backend performance involve optimizing databases, caching frequently requested API responses, and using asynchronous processing for compute-intensive operations. For frontend optimization, leverage a content delivery network (CDN), storing assets, such as product descriptions, FAQs, and blog posts, closer to users to minimize latency and improve load speeds across geographies.

Focus on API management & orchestration

The headless architecture requires the use of APIs to connect the user interface of your online store with backend services, from product data and inventory to checkout and customer profiles. As the number of touchpoints grows, including mobile apps, social media storefronts, and marketplaces, so does the need to efficiently coordinate these services.

To align your headless system with evolving business needs, implement structured API management. This includes deploying API gateways for authentication, traffic control, and monitoring; maintaining well-documented, versioned APIs; and introducing orchestration layers to combine responses from multiple services into a single output optimized for the user interface.

The final word

Headless commerce architecture provides online retailers with the flexibility to constantly optimize the customer experiences to emerging needs, use cases, and trends. This separation of the presentation layer from the backend part allows companies to iterate faster, integrate new channels more easily, and deliver high-performing digital storefronts. 

If your current platform is limiting your ability to innovate and grow, Iflexion’s experts can help you build resilient headless commerce solutions that support seamless operations and scalability.