With headless commerce, companies can build the front ends and back ends of their sites separately. This allows for greater flexibility while helping businesses scale their efforts faster and more efficiently.
BigCommerce provides ample options for retailers interested in building headless eCommerce sites. BigCommerce headless setups offer support so that businesses can better navigate the system's complexities, even if they are new to this option. We’ll look more closely at what headless eCommerce entails as well as the facts companies should know about BigCommerce and the possibilities it presents.
eBook
BigCommerce vs. Shopify: Everything You Need to Know
Understanding BigCommerce Headless Commerce
To make the choice between BigCommerce headless eCommerce options and the more traditional store setups, businesses should begin by carefully investigating what headless commerce offers and what makes this a unique way to build a virtual store.
What Is Headless Commerce?
In headless commerce, the front end—the part of the website that people see—is separate from the back end, which stores data for the site. This allows for greater flexibility in design. Site builders can also use these capabilities to create an improved user experience because they have more control and scalability on the user side of the site.
How BigCommerce and BigCommerce APIs Enable Headless Commerce
BigCommerce headless offers a variety of APIs and tools that help with headless development and headless commerce. Companies can use them when:
- Collecting payments
- Managing shopping carts
- Facilitating logins
- Organizing and managing catalogs
This enables businesses to build highly customized sites that produce positive user experiences.
Building a Headless Site With BigCommerce
The process of creating an effective BigCommerce headless commerce site requires you to think through the necessary components so that you can plan how you want to develop your website.
Technical Components
BigCommerce headless web development offers several core front-end technology options. They include:
- React
- Angular
- Vue.js
You also have a few choices when building the back end of the site. The platform offers RESTful APIs and the BigCommerce GraphQL API, which can connect to the front-end portion and provide retail capabilities.
BigCommerce Integration Process
For businesses interested in making this shift, we recommend reviewing the typical BigCommerce integration process so that you know what’s to come:
- Set up the BigCommerce back end for your store.
- Choose a front-end framework or BigCommerce headless CMS.
- Connect to the front end via BigCommerce APIs.
- Implement functionalities like product display, cart, and checkout.
Once your website has gone through these steps, the front and back ends should work well together, allowing you to start accepting customers.
Complexities of Building a Headless Site
Remember that building an effective headless eCommerce site requires navigating some challenges and complications.
Development Complexity
The site creation process demands advanced technical expertise in front- and back-end development. Developers must understand components like BigCommerce GraphQL or RESTful APIs. The process also calls for a longer development phase than traditional site setups.
Maintenance Challenges
Once you have established your site, you still need to budget time and resources for ongoing technical support. Since you have decoupled systems, this means that you’ll have to manage updates for both portions and need to allow for higher maintenance costs.
Integration Difficulties
Integration can also be more complex with headless sites. Bringing in third-party services may require additional research and efforts to ensure they work well throughout the website. You must account for increased debugging and testing.
Who Should Consider BigCommerce Headless?
You probably want to know more about whether BigCommerce's headless capabilities would be a good fit for your business. We find that while headless commerce works great for many companies, it’s not the best solution for everyone. Let's look at this more closely.
Ideal Candidates
Typically, the best candidates for headless eCommerce systems fall into two main categories:
The first category includes large enterprises and growing businesses. These organizations need to provide highly customized user experiences, which headless commerce can streamline. Large companies also generally appreciate high degrees of flexibility. This can help them innovate faster and respond to the latest trends or customer demands.
Secondly, headless commerce systems typically work well for heavily content-driven businesses. These companies often want to prioritize a specific BigCommerce headless CMS and closely control the distribution of their content. Headless commerce can facilitate this level of customization.
Who Might Not Benefit
On the other hand, some kinds of businesses generally don’t perform well when they employ headless eCommerce. These organizations may have better results with traditional BigCommerce systems.
Small and midsize businesses may not see a real benefit from this system. These companies often have limited resources to manage their sites, so the costs and complexities will likely outweigh the benefits.
Similarly, there is no sense in making a change simply because others do so. Businesses that successfully achieve their goals with the conventional BigCommerce themes, functions, and plug-ins do not need to change.
Considerations Before Adopting
Before moving forward with headless commerce, businesses ought to review a few key considerations to help them make the best decisions. Specifically, companies should:
- Consider their technical capabilities and team expertise. This can help them determine how challenging it would be to manage these new capabilities.
- Evaluate the budget for development and maintenance.
- Analyze whether the potential ROI from shifting to a headless setup would justify the necessary investment.
Conclusion
BigCommerce offers growing businesses ample opportunities to build responsive, flexible websites. With a headless setup, companies experience easier scaling and adjustments to site operations, but this is not necessarily the best option for all businesses.
If you want more information on what BigCommerce headless capabilities offer and how the system would work for your online store, contact us now to see how you can build your business with Groove Commerce. We can help you with a free audit that evaluates your existing site. You’ll also have an opportunity to chat with our BigCommerce experts and learn more about how to optimize your retail capabilities. To discover how we’ve helped fellow BigCommerce store owners, check out our case studies.
We also encourage you to further evaluate the different eCommerce platforms by reading our eBook entitled “BigCommerce vs. Shopify: Everything You Need to Know.”
