Headless commerce is being noticed lately as a surfacing eCommerce trend, usually known as online commerce expansion. To reap the advantage of this emerging trend, various online businesses increasingly use headless eCommerce platforms as an essential aspect.
This post will list the top headless eCommerce platforms that can offer your business lasting scalability and flexibility and how these platforms assist businesses in growth.
What is a Headless eCommerce Platform?
An infrastructure in which the frontend layers are separated from the backend eCommerce functionality is known as headless commerce. Simply put, the headless commerce model will decouple the storefront layer, the head, from the eCommerce platform, the body, to make it headless.
The headless strategy permits two isolated layers to perform independently and interact through APIs, offering you exceptional flexibility to craft a personalized and unique customer experience on the front end. Meanwhile, every backend eCommerce functionality stays intact and performs seamlessly.
A headless eCommerce platform like Zencart comprises in-built APIs to offer you the utmost flexibility to craft your online store for your business growth. You can also integrate any third-party extensions and frontend software per your business requirements and choice, like CRM, CMA, ORM, ERP, etc., with its commerce backend to use the best of both worlds.
What are the Benefits of Headless eCommerce?
1. Omnichannel Experience
Headless commerce and omnichannel surface are a perfect match as the headless approach enables you to offer a seamless shopping experience in whichever mode the customers choose to connect with your business.
A headless CMS helps optimize content for any device connected with the Internet of Things (IoT), like voice shopping and smartwatch. The experience stays the same with no disruption, and customers can also enjoy being connected with your business via their favorite shopping channels.
2. Seamless Integrations
Suppose you want to add rich features to your current eCommerce store. In that case, you can use API-focused eCommerce platforms that offer endless chances of integration to deliver an outstanding shopping experience.
Read Also: Best Frontend Frameworks for Headless eCommerce in 2023
3. Customizability
A headless eCommerce platform divides the front and back end into two different layers. This is an advantage for you, allowing users to customize their online store’s design endlessly.
You can choose an eCommerce platform that effectively meets all the commerce necessities while using your favorite front-end solution, whether a CRM, CMS, or a custom solution.
The best solution for frontend and backend layers will ease you to customize your business website to the fullest, which would be challenging with a traditional eCommerce platform.
4. Personalized Commerce Experience
If you want to win your customers’ hearts in this competitive eCommerce world, you need to target personalized commerce.
By following the headless approach, you can customize your customers’ dynamic, seamless, and personalized shopping experience. You will have complete control over your storefront design and content management, where the credit goes to the frontend flexibility. It lets the user enjoy the fast loading speed and smooth performance from your chosen commerce backend.
5. Scalability
Choosing a headless eCommerce platform with future-proofs your business as APIs permit you to adapt your frontend without needing to re-platform the backend when your current commerce function meets its boundaries.
You don’t need to develop a new website with API-powered platforms from scratch. It’s possible to replace outdated functions and integrate new features as your website grows.
Best Headless eCommerce Platforms in 2024
Below is a brief description of every headless eCommerce platform on our list that will ease you in choosing the best to suit your business requirements.
1. Shopify Plus
You can turn your digital device or screen into a sales channel supported by the power, speed, and scalability of Shopify Plus.
Shopify Plus is one of the best headless eCommerce platforms that the globe’s most innovative brands choose for their businesses.
A leading SaaS eCommerce platform, Shopify holds 1.75+ million active merchants. In the beginning, this platform was known as a hosted solution to assist small merchants in starting their online businesses. When it comes to Shopify Plus, it’s a complete, cost-effective package for large and medium-sized enterprises with advanced commerce features and endless in-build eCommerce automation tools and capabilities.
The headless solution of Shopify claims to enable the users to attain comprehensive creative control to let them develop new selling opportunities anywhere and handle it all, even from a central location.
Read More: Shopware 6.4.14.0 Release Notes – Major Updates
Top Features
- Shopify Plus Multiple Stores
- Shopify Plus Flow
- Wholesale Channel Management
- Shopify Scripts
- Launchpad
- Speed & Power
- Apps & integrations
- Unlimited Staff Accounts
- Advanced Security with SSL Certificates
Pricing
$2,000/month or a variable cost for higher volume businesses.
2. Shopware Enterprise
Shopware Enterprise helps develop a single content repository for various storefronts.
In this case, the data is retrieved via API; thus, it’s more advanced. It sticks to the decoupling mode, in which the frontend and backend are separated. It enables the host for layout updates without re-implementing the whole content. Also, it integrates various services, like Shopware for eCommerce or Pimcore for PIM (Product Information Management) purposes.
Shopware Enterprise boosts your online store’s efficiency by diminishing development time. A custom theme will make your store more efficient.
This headless eCommerce platform allows you to use third-party tools to consider and offer website content. Resultantly, the event process becomes a bit disruptive, and style features turn to be more adaptable.
Top Features
- Increased Control
- High Speed
- High Scalability
- Low Code Design
- Increased Security
Pricing
Starting at $600 Per Month
Read Also: Amazon Like eCommerce Marketplace Development
3. Magento Commerce Cloud
The headless feature opens the door to the best and expected shopping experiences by allowing merchants to rapidly write and offer app-like experiences across touchpoints, including mobile apps, single-page, and multi-page web apps, AR, VR, and IoT divides.
With headless API-based delivery, eCommerce business owners can quickly craft, evaluate, and deploy shopping experiences and provide customers with swift times and seamless experiences.
As discussed above, Headless disjoins the frontend and backend architecture, permitting Magento developers to perform independently on both without interrupting each other.
By merging this with 500+ Rest and GraphQL operations by Adobe Commerce, you will get complete functionality and flexibility across frontend layers, the websites with which your customers interact from a backend.
The headless integrates with other Adobe tools and third-party frontends, making commerce ventures connected, rich, and available everywhere.
Top Features
- Ece-Tools Package
- Enriched Security
- Easy Build/Deploy Process Management
- Improved Speed of Production Deployments
- Smooth Production Deployment & Configuration Workflow
- Boost Performance
- Complete Boost in Available Memory
- Local Development Template
- Page Speed Advancements
- PCI Compliance
Pricing
Starts from $40,000,
4. BigCommerce Enterprise
One more hosted eCommerce solution besides Shopify, BigCommerce comes feature-packed with all the top commerce features to assist businesses in developing their online presence easily.
BigCommerce Enterprise is best for enterprise-level brands as it includes the top-level of all necessary BigCommerce features. It claims to help create an exceptional customer experience powered by BigCommerce and advanced headless integration.
With varied, ready-to-use headless solutions, like CMS, front-end frameworks, and digital experience platforms, BigCommerce assists you in launching rapidly and customizing easily without needing long-time development.
BigCommerce headless is built for developers and store owners’ freedom of not starting from scratch. This is the flawless, headless eCommerce platform for merging content and commerce with the highest customizability and flexibility.
Read Also: 4 fundamental concepts for the creation of a successful e-commerce.
Top Features
- Single-Page Checkout
- Abandoned Cart Saver
- Faceted (Filtered) Search
- Headless Commerce
- Customer Groups & Segmentation
- Social Marketing
- Product Ratings & Reviews
- SMS Marketing
Pricing
Available upon request.
5. Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Demandware, have you heard of this platform? Well, let you know, Salesforce acquired Demandware in 2016.
A cloud-based, highly scalable eCommerce SaaS eCommerce solution, Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers top-class functionality and features for enterprise-level business.
With the target to ease the complicated infrastructure and costly hosting fees, Salesforce introduced a headless approach that allows customers to be the base of every business operation. The API-focused approach allows you to develop perfect front-end experiences while being flexible with Salesforce’s backend functionality.
Top Features
- Commerce Cloud Digital
- Storefront Reference Architecture
- Commerce Cloud Endless Aisle
- Order Management
- Commerce Portals
- Commerce Platform
- Predictive Intelligence
- Omnichannel Capabilities
- Marketing Tools
- Internationalization
Pricing
The price will vary on your business model: B2B, B2C, or B2B2C.
Read Also: Salesforce Mobile App Development: A Beginner’s Guide
5. Fabric
Headless means attaching all the sales channels (head) to a source with fabric. With this eCommerce platform, you can connect products, pricing, and order. You can create new experiences for the latest channels with the same data. The Fabric helps update content for all channels from a place.
When you choose the Fabric, you pick the technology you should have to launch fast. You can use this eCommerce platform or its products and connect it with custom-built and third-party technology. With APIs in the Fabric, you can avoid rigid eCommerce platforms and patchy integrations.
Fabric is the best eCommerce platform for merchandisers. You can turn spreadsheets into products and experience the management platform by choosing it. It also allows handling product details across every channel with fabric PIM. With Fabric, you can configure costing and promos for every product and increase the product assortment via dropshipping with the fabric marketplace.
Operators also use Fabric to move from the damaged systems to a linked commerce ecosystem. You can use this eCommerce platform’s OMS to view inventory and handle order fulfillment. With Fabric XM, you can optimize content, campaigns, and experiences. You can even plan and execute any eCommerce initiative from a single system.
Developers can also reap the benefits of the Fabric. They can craft a tech stack as their customers demand and break monolithic platforms with the headless commerce APIs. Even you can connect, configure, and boost commerce functionality and create experience components for business users with the headless CMS.
Top Features
- Inventory Optimization
- Reporting/Analytics
- Search/Filter
- Integrated Development Environment
- Bulk Ordering
- Reordering
- Mobile Access
- API
- Cataloging/Categorization
Pricing
Starting from $6000.00 per month.
7. SpreeCommerce
One more widely-known open-source headless eCommerce platform books its space in this list of top headless eCommerce platforms, SpreeCommerce, which is best at offering B2B commerce solutions. Its headless approach offers the utmost customizability and flexibility that backs multi-currency and multi-language global brands to develop their dynamic storefronts.
Meanwhile, as SpreeCommerce is an open-source platform, it demands the developers have robust coding skills and technical proficiency in building and customizing this platform to its fullest capabilities.
If you want to make your business run without conducting complex developing jobs, Spree provides Spree as a Service that merges all open-source functionalities and SaaS benefits.
Read Also: eCommerce Trends in 2022 Shaping The World of Online Shopping
Top Features
- Any 3rd party integrations
- React or Vue Storefront
- Multi-language and multi-currency
- Runs anywhere
- Single vendor or multi-vendor
- Single brand or multiple brands
- Modern API with pre-built SDKs
- Limitless storefront customization
Pricing
Premium $19 / per month (Billed yearly at $228)
8. CommerceTools
One of the globe’s leading eCommerce platforms, CommerceTools specializes in headless commerce. Based on the latest MACH principle ((Microservice-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless), this headless eCommerce platform backs its users in developing and customizing the best commerce solution to alter experiences to the specific requirements of your business and consumers.
Commercetools offers off-the-shelf commerce developing tools to allow the users to craft or augment your infrastructure at scale. Also, the API-first approach lets you connect commercetools backend to every frontend and 3rd-party app to attain matchless flexibility levels.
Top Features
- Rapid time-to-market
- Endless flexibility
- No vendor lock-in
- Merchant Center & PIM
- Zero-risk testing
- Omnichannel commerce
- Optimize conversion
- Composable commerce
Pricing
Available upon request. For reference, the implementation prices start from $300,000, and license fees start from $200,000 annually.
9. NopCommerce
As we know, an architectural pattern, headless commerce software decouples the frontend and backend of an eCommerce app. This separation permits more flexibility and customization in design, which means you can edit or update the storefront without interrupting both ends.
Developers can use any frontend technology, like 3rd-party CMS, IoT devices, mobile apps, or custom frontend solutions, to craft personalized content experience and connect the nopCommerce platform on the backend to handle the function and logic layers of the commerce site.
Headless eCommerce architecture uses an API via a RESTful system to offer content. The nopCommerce team’s official WebAPI plugin permits developers to communicate with such third-party services as ERPs, POS, PIMs, CMS, mobile apps, or custom frontend solutions using REST. More than 1.100 frontend and backend methods are available.
Top Features
- Best control & fast development
- Omnichannel support
- Customization
- Improved flexibility & agility.
Pricing
Range from $9.99 to $249.
10. OroCommerce
An open-source eCommerce platform, OroCommerce is chiefly used by B2B enterprises. Still, its complete outstanding commerce features can be best suitable for any business model, whether it’s B2B, B2B2B, or B2C.
As OroCommerce is developing to become a popular B2B solution, it backs traditional and headless approaches. If you need your B2B business to merge robust commerce backend and 3rd-party frontend software, like ERP or CRM, OroCommerce will be an ideal headless eCommerce platform you should consider.
Read Also: Top 5 Platforms to Develop B2B Multivendor Marketplace
Top Features
- Corporate Account Management
- Personalized B2B Catalog Management
- Access Controls, Roles, & Permissions
- Multiple Shopping Lists
- Multiple Price Lists
- Multiple Organizations, Websites & Stores
- Segmentation & Custom Reports
- Flexible Workflow Engine
- Content Management System
- Email Engine
- SEO Management
- Inventory Management
- Tax Management
- Promotions Management
- Quotes & Orders
- Customer Relationship Management
Pricing
Available upon request. Referentially, OroCommerce can cost $45,000 annually.
11. SAP CX Commerce Cloud
SAP headless commerce approach facilitates retailers to significantly boost their outreach using a headless architecture approach that indicates a complete split of essential commerce functions from the user experience layer.
Formerly known as SAP Hybris, within the SAP С/4HANA platform, a part of the SAP Customer Experience (CX) Suite, this headless eCommerce platform, SAP Commerce Cloud (former SAP Hybris Commerce), showcases a complete cloud-native flexible solution for B2C, B2B, and B2B2C brands.
Now you can reinvent, ease, and empower your eCommerce businesses with SAP Commerce Cloud. You need intelligence, agility, and an eCommerce platform that can scale and adjust your digital business growth to boost online sales.
This eCommerce platform holds a rich stack of features that help drive profitable commerce and enable you to reap the benefits of surfacing revenue opportunities, and unlocking data-driven, enterprise-wide intelligence to attract growth. Also, this platform amplifies your business to a level ahead.
Top Features
- Product content management
- Omnichannel commerce
- Order management
- Customer experience management
- Complete real-time analytics in combination with SAP Marketing Cloud
- Industry-specific accelerators
12. Saleor.Io
A #1 eCommerce platform on GitHub, Saleor offers a lasting strategy for any brand looking for extensibility, technology, and openness for improving customer experiences. ‘
Powered by a GraphQL server on top of a Django 2 and Python 3 framework, Saleor is crafted for the change. It automates processes, like shipping, ordering, or payment, to particular business needs with an open-source platform that’s simpler to adapt and expand.
In Saleor, the dashboard and storefront are React apps written in TypeScript and utilize Apollo GraphQL. The strict reviews and quality checks ease reading and understanding of code. High test coverage confirms it’s safe to deploy constantly.
Top Features
- Saleor Storefront Starters
- Saleor Dashboard
- Saleor Core API
Related Post: Multi Vendor Marketplace Development
Does Your Business Need Headless Commerce?
No, not all eCommerce stores need a headless solution. Various brands use the traditional eCommerce model today and also the monolithic model. Various agencies even recommend using a monolithic approach for well-established brands and enterprises.
Headless is not the best and the right fit for all businesses; for some, it’s best to resolve past unresolvable challenges.
A merchant should choose headless eCommerce if:
- It’s a content-driven enterprise.
- It’s looking to develop smooth digital experiences across various devices and customer touchpoints.
- It is experience-driven and needs the caliber to implement personalization, AR, or AI power.
- It holds international or multi-site selling requirements, serving various frontend experiences backed by the same backend.
- It’s selling online already, holds a separate website, and wants to merge the two.
- It uses a CMS already and needs to add commerce.
How to Choose the Right Headless eCommerce Platform?
At this point of the post, you have learned almost everything about a headless commerce platform that may meet all your business needs. Below are a few things that you should consider while choosing a platform for your next project:
Business Features
- Analytics
- Marketing
- User Experience
- Catalogs
- Shipping
Technical Features
- Payments
- Integrations
Customer Experience
- Security
- Mobile-friendliness
- SEO
Read Also: eCommerce Mobile App Development Cost & Key Feature
Final Opinion
A headless eCommerce platform can offer personalized customer experience, flexible development, and smooth integration with all the essential benefits.
So, going headless may be a good decision to boost your business performance. Using a headless platform will be the right choice if you hold all the development resources, like finance and time, to support headless conversion.
Although it may be engaging to follow headless commerce, it may not always be the best and right fit. The cost of a headless project may vary depending on the website’s functionality and customization level.
