Headless Use Cases

Premium E-Commerce Brands

Building an e-commerce website has traditionally been a huge challenge – with multiple platform options that all check different boxes. Whether it is WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Magento, most developers and marketers have different things to cringe about.

Due to the monolithic nature of these platforms, it is almost impossible to do everything awesome all at once. Because of this, most platforms specialize in the core business processes of order creation and fulfillment, and leave marketing and user experience functionality in the backlog.

As time has gone on and modern platforms like Shopify have emerged, a move toward headless has become more of the norm. For most brands, going headless for your first store might be a daunting task – as it requires more time finding the right development partner and implementing a custom solution whereas a Shopify store can be up and running in just a few clicks.

But for premium, more established brands such as Allbirds and SKIMS by Kim Kardashian, going headless totally made sense. Why?

  1. Customers expect a premium brand experience. We’re not talking about your average brand here. The extra time spent on a design that reflects the brand standards makes sense. The additional time spent on development is worth the effort, as the company has most likely already achieved product market fit and the resulting work just only further solidifies their most likely insane conversion rate.
  2. Speed and Scalability are paramount. Instead of focusing on marketing hacks and quick and easy solutions, the focus is on simplicity and performance. By going headless, you also take advantage of optimal speed and caching infrastructure, that can be resilient to even the most viral Instagram Post.

SaaS Companies

If you have ever worked at a Saas company, you could have had any number of experiences whether you were working in sales and marketing or on the product. But what if you could blur the lines between sales and marketing and product, and build one journey across the entire funnel and down into the product? That’s exactly what going headless can do for you.

Because most headless websites are built using the same tech as the Saas product itself, integrating the experience becomes super easy. In fact, some companies now are shipping their entire product – along with the marketing website, in one decoupled frontend project. This is because content is treated as just another data source. APIs to the actual SaaS app are accessed using the same patterns, making it easy to build it all in one.

What can this do for you from a capabilities perspective? Well, for one, it enables a completely hands off onboarding experience. Account creation and sales automate the revenue cycle on the website, then immediately transfer you over to the app experience. No separate app to login to, it’s all one journey.

This can be crucial to capture previous drop off points that were killing conversion. By adding everything into one flow, you can gather better analytics and work to iterate on the journey, optimizing as you go based on real data that leaves absolutely no gaps.

Websites that mean Business

We’re not talking about your typical brochure websites here. And we’re not even talking about websites with 1000s of pages. We’re talking about websites that want to do more than just inform, they want to interact with customers and enable them to do business with them as quickly and easily as possible.

Traditional CMS platforms can be difficult to build integrations into custom APIs or third party platforms, but when you go headless you can leverage modern tech that make those integrations easier. Also, by being platform agnostic (remember your content is just another data source) you are already going API first.

This mindset can open up minds to new things, thinking first about how data flows within the organization and bringing those sources directly to customers. Think about the following examples:

  • Instead of a contact form, an AI driven quote process that captures critical customer information and passes them along to a backend sales CRM via API.
  • A custom SaaS onboarding flow. Content for the flow is managed by the marketing team, but all fields filled out by the customer feed into the SaaS application’s database and provide a personalized experience once the customer signup is completed – increasing activation and decreasing churn.
  • A Location Finder: Most marketing agencies would install a third party plugin and duplicate data for marketing purposes. But most modern platforms have an API, so why not consider your locations just another data source. This data is of course controlled by the business – no reason not to create one source of that truth and leverage it instead of duplicating efforts.

The use cases are much broader than premium e-commerce, SaaS companies, and highly digital businesses. Literally any business can benefit from this architecture. It will come down to finding the right partner and executing.