Is the headless approach to enabling eCommerce the right answer for B2B firms, or is this just a passing fad? Some say headless future-proofs the business with enormous flexibility while others say it’s costly and doesn’t deliver on critical functionality.
Team Full Stack:
Adrienne Hartman, Vice President of Ecommerce & Campaign Sales at JJ Keller
Team Headless:
Vincent Mugavero, Senior VP, Digital Commerce & Enterprise Services at Carrier Enterprise
Peter Sheldon, Senior Director of Strategy at Adobe
KEY TAKEAWAYS
First you have to think about your customer: Adrienne Hartman said that they didn’t start by thinking about headless or non-headless. “We put ourselves in our customers’ shoes, and we ask ourselves ‘how do we make it easier for our customers to buy from us?’” and added “we don’t differentiate by our tech stacks – we differentiate in our functionality.” The bigger issue for her was which approach will allow them to differentiate fastest, and for JJ Keller they went with a full-stack platform.
Flexibility is the main benefit of headless, but you don’t need to go headless to be flexible: Vincent Mugavero said that they went with a headless implementation because of the flexibility it offered, but the initial benefit they saw was a much improved customer experience – “With headless our page load speeds are cut in half.” But Hartman said that newer commerce software has an “API-forward architecture” that “allows us to build the experience we want” without having to go headless. Plus, she said, if something goes wrong “it’s one ass to kick.”
Page load speed may actually be the primary benefit of headless: Although Hartman said that she didn’t think she sacrificed anything by going with an API-forward all-in-one approach, Mugavero was adamant that headless is the only way you can get the “lightning-fast” page load speed you want to offer your customers.
Headless is really the only approach if you’re digitally mature: Mugavaro also argued that even if you’re just launching digital for the first time, he’d suggest a headless approach. “You need to think about 5 years from now – if you go full-stack in 2 years you’re going to be looking at headless. I think of it as buying an insurance policy.” Peter Sheldon said he thought of headless as a way to future-proof the business so you don’t have to go through the pain of replatforming again in the next few years, though he suggested that headless may be overkill for a business just launching digital: “If you’re just getting started, in some ways you don’t need everything headless provides. You need to look out 10 years because you don’t want to have to replatform more than that. While full-stack will give you out of the box functionality to get launched, the question is whether it’ll allow you to grow the way you want down the road.”
Why are we talking about headless when we really should be talking about the business. Hartman stressed repeatedly that eCommerce practitioners are really missing the point if they’re focused on the technical architecture rather than the business strategy. “eCommerce is a customer acquisition channel and a sales channel. Bringing additional complexity doesn’t bring more value to the business. Helping IT feel like they’re on the latest platform doesn’t bring more value to the business. Can you bring core B2B functionality to the business with modern full-stack platforms? Yes, and we’re future-proofed because modern platforms provide the flexibility we need.”
You need to consider the technical resources you have in-house: Sheldon said that If you have limited IT resources in-house, there’s only 1 approach and you have to go with full-stack because you’re not going to have the budget to build the way you want with headless. But Mugavaro disagreed, saying that agencies have been building headless solutions for years and that even digitally immature companies can work with an agency to build a quick start headless solution to get launched quickly and still be futureproofed. Even so, Hartman said that there’s risk in that because she doesn’t want to be beholden to an agency – they’ll be the only people who understand how the site is built. And what if they want to change agencies? Or bring the engineering in house?
Andy Hoar concluded by wondering if the headless approach had become popular because it was more of a “toy store” for engineers who just like to build things, though he conceded that – especially for mature organizations – headless is the way forward.