What is headless commerce?

Headless commerce is an approach to e-commerce architecture where the frontend and backend of an e-commerce technology stack are separated. Backend technologies still connect to frontend sales channels to make commerce experiential but they are not coupled. Connections form through application programming interfaces (APIs) that are more scalable than coupled architectures.

Popular platforms like BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, and Salesforce now offer APIs, but there’s still an issue with coupling on the backend. This creates unscalable monoliths that stifle growth and create technical debt. To direct this, composable commerce emerged. With this approach, you can compose a scalable backend commerce solution with the best technology from multiple providers.

There are even more aspects to headless commerce, including data orchestration and microservice management. These are practices Amazon adopted early on to become successful. You can use these practices to achieve your own success without replatforming and building everything in-house. To help you, we have dozens of articles from seasoned developers, engineers, and system integrators.