As businesses look for ways to optimize their e-commerce operations and deliver more individualized and customer-centric experiences, they are increasingly turning to headless commerce – a trend shifting the entire retail industry. 

What is headless commerce? 

For many retailers, headless commerce has taken hold in the past two years, accelerated by the need to rapidly adapt during the pandemic. This relatively new e-commerce concept separates the front-end user interface from the back-end systems that manage the e-commerce operations, such as processing transactions, managing inventory, and handling other e-commerce operations, allowing for faster adoption of new front-end retail experiences. In other words, the “head” isn’t needed like it once was thanks to advanced API integrations, which can allow seemingly disparate technologies to talk with one another. This results in a front-end that is decoupled from the systems that manages the store’s inventory, orders, payments, and other e-commerce features. 

By decoupling the systems, headless commerce can also enable faster and more agile development, as well as better scalability and performance. This is because the retailer can choose the solution that works best for their tech stack or customer experience without being constrained by the limitations of a monolithic platform. 

Fundamental changes in technology and consumer behaviors are causing retailers to redefine the ways they serve customers and differentiate themselves from competitors. This shift in the business and IT landscape is leading to a front-end transformation to reshape the way people connect, transact, and engage in the digital era. In fact, recent surveys have found that 80 percent of businesses that don’t currently have a headless commerce architecture implemented today plan to implement one within the next two years. 

Here are five ways in which headless commerce benefits retailers: 

1. Increased Flexibility: By using headless commerce, retailers are given more flexibility to customize the user experience and create unique, personalized experiences for their customers, which in turn can help to boost revenues. 
2. Custom User Experience: By going headless, retailers can choose innovative technologies to build a unique experience for their customer base, while incorporating design practices to create faster, more intuitive, and engaging physical and digital environments.
3. Greater Personalization: By leveraging technologies that best serve their customers, retailers can offer highly personalized experiences that align with the customer’s shopping preferences and increase the percentage of return customers. 
4. Better Performance: Headless commerce systems can be optimized for performance and scalability, which can lead to faster load times and a better overall user experience. 
5. Increased Innovation: Retailers can be more agile and innovative with headless commerce, as they are not limited by the constraints of a traditional, monolithic e-commerce platform. 

Retail e-commerce platforms are becoming increasingly complex based on the level of consumer expectations and functionality, as well as integrations with different third-party systems. When retailers meet their customers where they are, it is possible to help shoppers achieve all their shopping goals. 

Mike Storiale is vice president of innovation and development at premier consumer financial premier consumer financial services company Synchrony (NYSE: SYF). With more than 90 years of proven expertise across key industries and a range of business customers in all sizes, Synchrony provides its retail partners with deep insights into consumer behavior, trends, and technology to help them stay ahead of the curve — and stay competitive.