Comment by s_severus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by s_severus | Hacker News Reader

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There is a compelling argument for headless e-commerce, which is the _freedom to build and rebuild your storefront using the technologies that you want_. With non-headless (traditional) platforms, you are limited to using the templating features or themes provided by the vendor. Another benefit is the ability to power multiple clients (web, mobile, in-store) from a single API & back-end.

A full refresh of the storefront using the latest technologies or developer workflows can prove either impossible or incredibly challenging. That's why there are a lot of e.g. Magento projects stuck with huge JS bundles and unpleasant developer ergonomics. Ultimately there is the risk of needing to "replatform" - re-build the entire solution (front-end and server-side) on a different framework/platform, which is not a desirable situation to be put in.

That said, headless has its trade-offs. Building a storefront is not trivial. For many merchants it may not make sense. But for a certain class of use-cases it is a massive advantage.

It should also be noted that "headless e-commerce" has also graduated into buzzword territory, so you might get an inflated impression of the relative importance or use of it. Even Magento & Shopify are leaning into "headless" despite their clear interest in the monolithic model which is relied on by the majority of their marketplace offerings currently. Other platforms (e.g. Saleor, Sylius) which started off as non-headless have recently re-branded as headless.

Ultimately there is definitely hype in this area, but there is also genuine value too.

Source: I've been developing a headless e-comm framework for the past 3 years (vendure.io)

> But for a certain class of use-cases it is a massive advantage.

Specifically, businesses holding inventory and operating at between $1M to $100M in revenues. This is a sweet-spot market, and is usually when a company is most earnestly exploring what differentiates it. You're A/B testing every feature under the sun to find what improves your ability to sell. You've started to cluster your customer into segments, and tailor your marketing efforts accordingly. Operations are still crystalizing, and the company still hasn't found its "step".

Headless lets me, as a business operator, try out new things at a fraction of the cost as the "old days". In 2010, it was a multi-week or month-long project to get PayPal checkout integration. Now I can get it up and running in a few hours, alongside Stripe and some "Pay Later" solution in the same sprint.

The programmer in me loves the maturity of the new ecosystem, and that a lot of "best practices" have evolved to answer questions my development team has on how to get their job done. They're not searching for algorithms to best persist b-trees to disk while supporting random searches, but whether changing the category page to show on-model shots vs. side shots is more effective at generating click-thru.

There's a huge ecosystem of plug-ins, add-ons, and apps that let businesses explore new ideas with a LOT less risk. Headless is a great wrapper to cobble all those vendors and in-house solutions together, before deciding to double-down on specific decisions and implementations.

Some super good points!

On the last point on the adoption vs. hype question. Indeed there has previously been some strong buzz-word tendencies around headless architecture probably way ahead of the relative use of such solutions. Nevertheless, I also believe that the demand of such solutions from the merchants' side has been steadily increasing recently due to:

* increased ecom competition; making it more important to differentiate through enhanced performance (page-speed + SEO); better UX; advanced analytics and tools to create differentiated customer journeys - all areas that are better catered for with a headless solutions

* more advanced merchant use cases; more B2B companies coming into the ecom market with complex needs or social commerce solutions not covered by existing solutions - these all need a specialised setup which is better build from a headless foundation

* more digital-first/digital-only merchants coming to market with a strong ecom focus and not willing to make setup compromises which you often will have starting with a monolithic structure

That being said, there is still a long way to making headless the preferred way of building commerce - but the tailwind seem to be there!

EDIT: Formatting

It’s important to note the centralisation going on in e-commerce. “Side hustle” sellers are mostly not able to afford stock at the moment (too many have lost their main jobs), letting those with the capital to keep trading dominate.

Those sellers have different options as far as building storefronts go.

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