Bigcommerce with the version of Bigcommerce B2B is the ideal platform for different sizes of business when taking part in ecommerce. First, with the outstanding function of Bigcommerce, you’ll find a suitable solution for your online shop and take advantage of it to develop, attract more customers. However, if your brand wants to broaden, you can wish to deliver more convenient functions to meet the needs of your customers, and deliver the best service to win over the competitor. Therefore, you will want to upgrade your Bigcommerce store. If you still don’t know and find an effective solution, check out our post. In this article, we bring for you an amazing idea: Bigcommerce headless: The powerful solution for selling online.
First, you should be familiar with headless architecture
In its most basic form, headless commerce is the separation of the front end and back end of an ecommerce application, according to a 2013 Forrester Research research. This design allows brands to develop anything they want, whenever they wish. Moreover, it lets businesses enhance the consumer experience.
The usage of APIs, experience managers, and tools like Heroku and Mulesoft, as well as the necessity of IT partners, are all hallmarks of headless development. These systems are an important aspect of any company’s innovation strategy, as they bring new features and experiences that motivate customers and keep them up to date on their expectations.
What is Headless BigCommerce?
BigCommerce architecture that separates the storefront from the backend refers to headless BigCommerce. Headless BigCommerce relates to a variety of channels via APIs, including mobile, web, in-store, and email.
The freedom of establishing connectors is the strength of headless BigCommerce.
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We’ll give you some example headless architecture
The following is an example of a headless BigCommerce architecture:
- BigCommerce – Admin, Multi-channel, Customer Data, Payments, Tax
- Fluent Commerce – Order management
- Next.js – Frontend/Storefront
- Algolia is a search engine that helps you find what you’re looking for.
- Sanity CMS is a content management system
Headless BigCommerce allows you to choose the best goods for each of your ecommerce needs. It all adds up to a new degree of versatility that you won’t find anywhere else.
Is BigCommerce headless?
BigCommerce is a feature-rich ecommerce platform which offers a variety of services and features. It is completely possible—and in many situations desirable—for BigCommerce stores to go headless thanks to their comprehensive BigCommerce headless API.
Every e-commerce platform is different, and going headless with BigCommerce has benefits and drawbacks. BigCommerce, on the other hand, gives an easy-to-use and robust backend engine for lots of people’s ecommerce sites. If you wish to go headless, it can easily be combined with a flexible frontend.
Why implement headless commerce with BigCommerce?
To begin, BigCommerce’s out-of-the-box solution is ideal for new businesses. With an easy-to-understand, easy-to-use package, it allows you to quickly get up and running with good ecommerce services.
However, when your business grows, the increasing site traffic, the demand to integrate your marketing attempts across several channels, and the need to provide rich, immersive experiences for your developing client base may prompt you to look for something more powerful than BigCommerce.
While maintaining the typical BigCommerce structure, it is likely to scale your backend functions. However, all of the additional add-ons and bootstrapping make for a complicated solution that will begin to slow down site performance.
Fortunately, BigCommerce understands the necessity for organizations to extend their operations and has designed its platform to work with a variety of enterprise-level ecommerce components.
Then, we move to the features of BigCommerce Headless Commerce
The characteristics of headless commerce are dependent on the head in question, however regardless of the CMS you use, there are a few major features of BigCommerce’s headless commerce capabilities:
- Select your Front-End: Thanks to headless commerce, brands may use whatever front-end they want, whether BigCommerce offers a formal connector or not
- API Performance: Headless cannot happen if not good API performance. BigCommerce APIs can handle over 400 calls per second, are bidirectional, and are open to the public.
- API Accessibility: BigCommerce manages over 90% of its platform API accessible, letting brands and agencies to integrate as much or as little of the commerce engine as they want.
- Documentation: We have open-sourced our BigCommerce for WordPress plugin and provide available developer documentation to assist others in creating additional headless implementations.
- PCI-compliant and embedded Checkout: Simply routing web traffic from the principal domain to a “shop.mybrand” or “store.mybrand” instance is not considered headless. Our Checkout SDK enables marketers to fully install the end-to-end purchasing experience in a variety of front-ends and platforms while also maintaining analytics and user monitoring.
- Control various front-end experiences from a single BigCommerce Control Panel with the Channels View. Like Amazon or Facebook, each shoppable experience relates to a channel.
Now, we point out the pros and cons of Bigcommerce headless
The benefits you will receive when applying Bigcommerce headless
API coverage is extensive
You may use (nearly) any of BigCommerce’s ecommerce services in your headless environment because 92% of the platform is approachable via APIs. Their APIs are also quick, processing up to 400 requests per second.
Using a third-party CMS is an option
BigCommerce includes a content management system (CMS) as part of their ecommerce package, however many businesses claim that a third-party CMS is more suitable to their needs. These days, there are various extremely cool content management systems to choose from. Contentful, Prismic, Netlify CMS, Builder.io, Storyblok, and WordPress are all excellent choices. When you go headless, you can apply any CMS you choose in conjunction with BigCommerce’s ecommerce services. Content modifications are quick and straightforward when you use a content management system.
Use of third-party backend services is an option
Applying BigCommerce headlessly (decoupling the backend and frontend operations) frees up your CMS options while also letting you use a variety of third-party backend services such as PIM, CRM, and Order Management applications. It grants you an approach to more features and a wider range of ecommerce services. The range and complexity of services you can include into a headless solution, where you may customize your set-up to match your particular needs, far outnumbers what’s available with BigCommerce’s standard offering.
Site load times that are faster
You can free your frontend from the burden of shared processing power thanks to decoupling it. There is no longer any resource sharing, which has a negative impact on performance. If you’re also running your frontend store on PWAs or static sites, the distinction in site pace will be unmatched.
WordPress integration is excellent
BigCommerce has invested a lot of attempt into combining with WordPress-powered sites and storefronts. They’ve created the BigCommerce for WordPress (BC4WP) plugin, which lets you access the BigCommerce platform’s functionalities while maintaining your WordPress site and CMS (more on this later).
From a single location, you may manage several channels
BigCommerce gives you a single view of your inventory and stock ranks across all of your channels, so you can track sales and reorders regardless of having to manually adjust stock across all of your web stores.
Test at a faster rate
Trying tests on multiple consumer segments with the standard BigCommerce setup can be a time-consuming procedure. Because the many components of BigCommerce’s platform are pre-integrated, making a difference in one area can have unintended implications in another. By dividing the head and the body, you can quickly examine and iterate on the frontend layer regardless of requiring backend developer input.
Content management
A lot of content-heavy businesses are going headless. It’s understandable because they want to get the most out of their content. They can employ strong content management organizations instead of depending on the restricted content management connections available for BigCommerce.
For instance, a platform like Contentful may be an excellent headless CMS to use because it allows you to personalize headlines, paragraphs, and product descriptions. As a result, headless BigCommerce offers greater content flexibility. Headless allows you to share content across several channels, such as the web and mobile apps.
Personalization and customization
One of the advantages of using BigCommerce without a server is that you may take advantage of the capability of product customisation. You can develop a wide range of items, each with its own set of qualities and options, ensuring that each consumer receives precisely what they want. BigCommerce’s headless intelligence will enable you to customize your brand across all platforms.
Multi-storefront
Different front-ends for different market sectors or audiences make up a multi-storefront. You could, for example, have one page for visitors from the United States and another for tourists from other countries. However, both are supported by the same BigCommerce backend. A B2B and B2C shop could be another example. You can separate the two with BigCommerce and maintain everything sleek and efficient.
Branding that is distinct
It’s difficult to seek a theme or template that properly matches your company’s brand. The majority of the time, you’ll want to rearrange things. Going headless gives you the ability to quickly turn a bespoke design into a new theme. This suggests you’re not going to make any concessions along the way.
Connecting new services
Adding new services to your headless BigCommerce configuration is simple when you use Gatsby or NextJS as the frontend framework.
Let’s say your team is willing to broaden its marketing attempts and wishes to integrate a new CRM platform into the shop. Integrating the two platforms with a standard BigCommerce build would require a substantial amount of time and work.
A headless BigCommerce store, in other words, is already guided by API, so you can simply establish which website events should cause CRM activities.
Performance improvement
This is, without a doubt, the greatest significant advantage of going headless. Many store holders turn a blind eye to their website’s performance. As the number of goods and orders on a monolithic site rises, the site’s speed tends to slow. The user’s experience and, finally, the conversion rate suffer as performance declines.
JB Hi-Fi, Superdry Australia, Skullcandy, and Koala, for example, use hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars yearly upgrading their stores to provide customers the greatest possible experience. And they make a huge return on their investment.
Performance will only become more critical to a store’s long-term success when Google’s “User Experience” algorithm upgrade rolls out in June 2021. The storefront is divided from the data and heavy queries via a decoupled headless architecture. Your store’s performance won’t suffer if a thousand more visitors arrive as a result of a viral Reddit post.
When you use Gatsby or NextJS with your headless setup, the site’s content is pre-rendered as static assets that are served through a content delivery network instead of communicating with a server. This drastically reduces the time it takes for the site to load.
Conversion rate has improved
Because the proof rises from the Gatsby people, this benefit is a little anecdotal. During a recent webinar where they outlined the advantages of merging Gatsby and Shopify, they acknowledged that stores who switched to a headless architecture had a 30 percent increase in conversion. While they don’t go into detail about how they did it, it’s safe to infer it’s a combination of a tailored UI and a significantly faster-loading website.
Keep all of BigCommerce’s fantastic tools
When you have an intention to incorporate new technologies and create wacky, interactive interfaces, it’s easy to lose sight of this point. However, going headless does not imply that you’re using a diluted version of BigCommerce. The best features of good and order administration, payment processing, and reporting are all yours to retain.
Some functionalities aren’t going to work. Because analytics aren’t linked to the correct frontend, they won’t talk with you so much. Fortunately, there are numerous excellent analytics solutions available, such as Google Analytics and Segment.
PWA feature that comes pre-installed
If you’ve arranged your BigCommerce store using Gatsby or NextJS, you’ll have approached to progressive web app features right away. Push notifications, bookmarking your store on the home screen, and functioning offline are just a few models.
Up to what you’re trading, half of your customers will most likely come to your store via their mobile device. Providing users with a few truly cool PWA characteristics can drastically improve the user experience.
A safe and secure environment
Going headless also increases the security of your website. The entire attack surface of the store is reduced by pre-rendering assets and diminishing the linked communication with the database. The APIs applied to supply content to a headless server. The BigCommerce website is almost entirely read-only.
BigCommerce is still in charge of payment processing and user data management. All of this is protected by their enterprise-grade security architecture, PCI Data Security Standards, and tight account security policies.
And the drawback you can face with when using Bigcommerce headless
High level of complexity
Headless BigCommerce is capable of a great deal. However, how is this a bad thing?
There are more moving elements to break down the more systems you have. You may end up consuming more time and money on upkeep than you would if you used a simpler solution, such as BigCommerce. Via Forrester’s 2020 tech reports for both B2B and B2C, 84 percent of ecommerce enterprises are at a beginner or intermediate level of digital maturity. There are a plethora of technology solutions available, but they do not always provide value.
Expensive construction
Both development and maintenance are costly. BigCommerce headless is a horrible choice if you have a small team or need to scale quickly. It can be much more difficult for developers to learn how to make multiple systems function together. Every merch has its own set of demands, which suggests engineers must understand a wide range of systems and code. You might also engage a specialist in each sector, but this will be costly.
Some BigCommerce plugins are no longer supported
Some BigCommerce plugins aren’t compatible with the headless CMS. So, if you’re thinking about going headless, double-check with your developers to assure they can be suitable with all of your plugins.
There are more systems to manage
Going headless means you’ll have to control more structures to keep your website up and operating. You’ll be modifying content, adding new goods, and conducting your analytics on three different platforms rather than going into BigCommerce.
If you’re familiar with online technologies, this isn’t a major disadvantage because you’re familiar with using a variety of platforms in your daily activities. If you prefer to keep things simple and centralized, though, you’ll have to get used to switching between platforms.
When is it fine to consider becoming headless?
There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to becoming headless. Every company must examine its own requirements.
The following questions can assist you in determining whether or not you require headless BigCommerce:
- Do you make use of custom services and middlewares like CMS, search, and custom payment?
- How much storefront flexibility do you require?
- Are your teams familiar with JS frameworks, such as React and Node.js?
- Do you have a sizable digital footprint that necessitates significant business process automation and complicated integrations?
Conclusion
After going through our article, we hope you get a good grasp of Bigcommerce headless. Headless is the trend in the ecommerce industry because it gives you a power to leverage your online shop. Therefore, you can apply Bigcommerce headless to benefit from integration. As a result, it will meet your needs when you want to scale the brand to service customers better as well as be outstanding over the competitor. If you have intention to apply for Bigcommerce headless, don’t hesitate to find our expert to know more about Bigcommerce development service.
