Headless Commerce

Headless commerce means splitting a shop into two parts that talk to each other. The first part is the selling engine, which holds the products, the prices, the stock and the orders without deciding how any of it looks. The second part is the shop front, meaning the screen a person actually touches. Because the engine has no face of its own, people started calling it headless.

The point of the split is that one engine can feed several fronts at once. The same product list then appears on the website, inside the phone app and on the screen behind the counter in the branch. Change a price once and all three change together, and a new sales channel added next year simply reads from the same engine, so nobody retypes four thousand products.

Now the honest part, because this costs more than a small shop needs. A normal online shop arrives with its screens already built and tested, while a headless one leaves somebody to build every screen from scratch and keep building them as the shop grows. You pay twice at the start and then keep paying, since two pieces of software need looking after instead of one. For a shop with two hundred products and a single website, that money buys nothing the customer can see.

It earns its keep in a narrower set of cases. You might be selling in three countries with different rules, or running branches whose counter screens have to keep working when the line drops. The third case is wanting a phone app that feels like an app rather than a website in a frame, and that one is common enough to be the real reason most businesses ask. A proper mobile app and a website can then share one product list and one stock count.

One question sorts the two cases quickly, and it is how many different screens will show the same product next year. If the answer is one, buy a normal shop system and spend the difference on photographs and delivery. If it is three or more, the split starts paying for itself. Linkysoft asks that question before quoting any web application, and half the time the answer talks the client out of it. A shop that outgrows its front later can still move to this design without throwing the products away, so Linkysoft keeps the product data clean from the first day.