When should Shopify Merchants go headless? Top 5 reasons

You must've heard all about it.

Headless eCommerce could be considered the future of our industry. With benefits like improved website speed, more flexibility, and outstanding UX, it is nearly impossible to avoid this new technology and the popularity around it. But when is it the right time for your brand to go headless? How can you determine if it's the right choice? Well, fear no more, we’re here to eliminate all question marks and dig deep into when Shopify merchants should go headless.

In this article, we have listed the five main signs that could indicate it’s time to switch over to a headless commerce solution. Read ahead to learn more about the following 5 reasons:

• Experience high growth

• Prioritize branding

• Omnichannel presence

• Global expansion

• Enhance Security

1. You are continuously scaling

As your online business is becoming more successful, it’s going to get difficult to keep up with your existing pace and capability. With a growing amount of consumers visiting your eCommerce website, you’re going to want to be able to offer the best service you can, attracting more customers day by day. Due to consumers’ demands increasing almost constantly, you'll have to continue to adapt to new technologies and double-down on performance to ensure that you are still delivering at your best.

Headless commerce is known for its superior ability to improve site speed. By taking the right measures, you could boost your conversion rate, as well as your engagement, with a faster and more practical experience.

Therefore, if your brand is constantly scaling up, and you’re struggling to deliver at your top pace, going headless will undoubtedly bring you massive benefits.

2. You are prioritizing a branded experience

Ask any seasoned website owner or marketer, and they will tell you that in the present time, you simply cannot brand your business the right way if you lack a powerful online presence. In the current digital age, people aren’t necessarily shopping for products – they are shopping for experiences. A positive brand experience will improve your customer retention tremendously. Seeing how important prioritizing uniqueness is, going headless will offer endless possibilities.

Not only does headless commerce offer a huge range of creative and individual aspects to your online store, it also provides complete control and flexibility when designing your front-end. You and your developers will be given all the freedom to design a custom online experience since there are no limits caused by a predetermined user interface.

Going headless would be super beneficial if you’re looking to create visionary, fast websites and want more advanced functionality that plugins can’t provide without painful customization.

Check out this article: How to improve the eCommerce user experience, for more information on creating unique branded experiences.

3. You are adopting an omnichannel approach

According to Target, multi-channel consumers generally spend four times as much as store-only consumers, and ten times more than digital-only consumers. Sounds promising? Well, it is. Combining the benefits of physical and digital commerce is an absolute game-changer. Brands that stand out in providing an optimal omnichannel experience will undoubtedly lead the pack. Taking into account how smartphones have become closely linked with how people shop, it’s no wonder that various retailers are shifting to a mobile-first approach. As consumers are demanding more choices and flexibility every day, it seems like the clock is ticking for businesses that have yet to adopt this new tactic.

By introducing your brand to omnichannel commerce, you’ll be allowed to reach consumers at every touchpoint of the buying experience — online and off — ensuring they will have a unified experience wherever they encounter your brand.

Thinking of expanding your brand's horizons by combining off- and online? Headless commerce is what you’ve been looking for.

4. You are expanding globally

Headless eCommerce has been making huge strides in the past years. One of the reasons is its great use case for internationally focused eCommerce brands. Shopify and Shopify Plus are great, but they do present some challenges for eCommerce brands selling in more than one place. Today, to sell abroad with Shopify, brands are required to run a Liquid Shopify Plus storefront for each country. Meaning each website has its own codebase that needs to be managed. This presents a few challenges:

• Managing multiple codebases for multiple stores requires more human capital or even duplicate teams to handle all the workload of managing multiple codebases.

• Making slight regional nuances from products to discounts or texts requires a lot of repetitive work which can complicate going global and leaves more room for human error.

• It’s also common that tech stack apps, add ons, and tools only apply to one store. Duplicating the functionality across multiple stores will multiply the cost of the tool by the number of stores you have.

With the right headless commerce solution, you can have one codebase to manage everything, —one codebase for every store in every region. Meaning, with a headless setup changes can be made on a global scale by one person or team, and greatly reduce management time and the opportunity for mistakes.

5. You want to enhance your security

Last but not least are the great security benefits. Being headless enhances the security of your webshop since you're separating your content from the presentation layer. Your headless CMS can tightly secure any administrative, or data-holding areas because it is entirely separate from the actual displayed website. You will be less likely to experience a DDoS attack and be rendered offline, or be unable to access systems and network resources. Going headless also allows for easy and secure third-party integrations.

Therefore, if you’re aiming to enhance your online business security, headless commerce is the way to go. Better safe than sorry, right?

Conclusion

Whether you’re constantly scaling, or you’re trying to expand globally, going headless has great benefits for all kinds of eCommerce retailers. If your business is at its stage of development where it has outgrown its native capabilities and you have decided to focus on speed, presentation, and creative customization, going headless must sound like a satisfactory deal for you.

At Story of AMS, we build headless commerce solutions on Shopify Plus. To learn more check out this article: Why Shopify Plus is the best Headless eCommerce solution.