Go headless or composable without breaking your long-term suite contract

Preparing your ecommerce company to adopt a headless or composable approach is inevitable, and if you have not started yet, you are late.

Fortunately, contrary to popular belief, the move towards headless or composable commerce doesn’t have to be a disrupting event. Even a long-term contract with a traditional ecommerce platform doesn’t stop you from taking the first step toward a headless or composable future.

Modernize your ecommerce architecture by taking a phased approach instead of a full migration. Start on the frontend, exactly where the customer experience happens. With the right partners, you can do it seamlessly and in a cost-effective manner.

This article helps you understand how Vue Storefront and Vaimo can assist you on the journey toward headless and composable commerce.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• What is headless and composable commerce?
• Key benefits of headless commerce
• The costs of not going headless or composable
• Composable commerce doesn’t mean re-platforming
• Lower your TCO and get to market faster with Vue Storefront and Vaimo

What is headless and composable commerce?

Unlike conventional all-in-one ecommerce models, headless commerce separates the frontend and backend of a web store.

Composable commerce builds on the concept of headless commerce, however, instead of decoupling just the frontend and the backend layer, it separates all the other functionalities like CMS, payment, or search. This allows companies to compose a tech stack of best-of-breed solutions (microservices).

The approach focuses on modularity and agility. It empowers companies to modify and tailor their web store to cater to constantly evolving customers’ demands.

With composable commerce and its API-first approach, businesses can leverage the newest technologies and services to provide their customers with a smooth, individualized experience.

Key benefits of headless commerce

Decoupling your store offers several benefits that can help you meet the evolving demands of your customers:

• Firstly, it provides flexibility, which allows you to update, customize, and add new features to your store quickly and easily.
• Additionally, decoupling your store makes it easy to scale up or down to meet your customers’ demand levels, which can help manage your store’s growth.
• Moreover, it gives you greater control over how your store looks and operates.
• Decoupling also improves the performance of your store, as the frontend and backend run independently, allowing you to easily enhance its performance.
• Lastly, you can achieve greater control over the security of your store, which can help you protect your customers’ data effectively.

The costs of not going headless or composable

The benefits of adopting a headless or composable commerce approach are becoming increasingly clear as pointed out in the MACH Alliance Annual Research 2023, and businesses that fail to embrace this trend may find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. It may result in missed business opportunities and an inability to keep pace with the evolving needs of the market.

Composable commerce doesn’t mean re-platforming

Fortunately if your ecommerce business is based on a legacy platform like SAP Commerce Cloud, you don’t need to delay your move towards headless or composable any longer. Furthermore, our trusted agency partner Vaimo is able to integrate Vue Storefront with other ecommerce platforms like Oracle Commerce, HCL Commerce, Magento and others. To reap the benefits of a decoupled system, choose a scalable frontend solution that will enable you to take the first step towards a truly flexible and scalable approach to ecommerce architecture.

Embarking on a composable journey by beginning with the frontend can offer a fast and cost-effective option as opposed to complete re-platforming. Rather than overhauling the entire system, you can incorporate a high-performing, mobile-oriented frontend onto your existing ecommerce platform. This approach can result in a reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) and a faster time-to-market, leading to profitable outcomes right from the start.

First, composable solutions can lower overall change costs by around 40% when compared to legacy platforms. Creating your own storefront from scratch can take up to a year and cost upwards of $500,000. It’s time-consuming, costly, and complex.

Second, according to a study by Forrester Research, every day you delay launching your eCommerce site can add up $2.5 million in lost sales annually. That’s a pretty strong argument for why TTM is so important. With a high-code Frontend as a Service, all the core elements for frontend development are already available to your developers,so they can create your website or application in significantly less time and focus on customizing pre-built components instead of building from scratch.

The top reasons to begin your composable journey with the frontend include:

• You can go headless or composable without re-platforming. You don’t have to switch to a new ecommerce platform to benefit from headless or composable commerce. By starting your transition with a pre-built and customizable Frontend as a Service, you can bypass custom development and incorporate a high-performing frontend onto your current suite software. With ready integrations provided by Vue Storefront, the process is fast and smooth.
• A fast frontend will drive your web performance, conversion, and sales. The underlying frontend technology impacts the entire web performance and the buyer journey. Even a small delay in load speed can affect conversion rates. For this reason, investing in frontend performance is particularly beneficial during an economic downturn since it offers a rapid return on investment with a low total cost of ownership.
• The customer experience starts at the frontend. Since most of the digital consumer experience happens on the frontend, it’s essential to ensure that your frontend platform meets the requirements of today’s consumers who seek quick, customized, and seamless shopping experiences.
• Unlock the possibility to future-proof and scale easily. Composable commerce future-proofs your system through ongoing iteration and innovation. By beginning your ecommerce development with a frontend solution such as Vue Storefront, you can flexibly expand your geographic reach and increase traffic. With auto-scaling capabilities, you can effortlessly manage unexpected traffic surges. Vue Storefront also offers a multi-store experience, where a single backend can support multiple frontends, each of which can be customized to meet the specific needs of different markets.

Lower your TCO and get to market faster with Vue Storefront and Vaimo

Vue Storefront is an enterprise-ready, customizable Frontend as a Service (FEaaS) that accelerates custom frontend development and helps to cut down the Total Cost of Ownership (DevOps, maintenance, development), while increasing revenue.

Its performance-oriented architecture combines a mobile-friendly experience and an API-first approach, which enables ecommerce businesses to build flexible, future-proof webshops on Vue.js, and React.

A flexible and agnostic approach helps to connect with any service, and swap them when needed to build a composable architecture with best-of-breed market solutions:

• Over 30 pre-built integrations with market-proven solutions (SAP Commerce Cloud, and more)
• Out-of-the box integrations available for Vue.js and React
• Easy connectivity for custom developed APIs
• Fast, pre-built and fully customizable frontend library for Vue and React
• IMPACT Services, providing holistic guidance and support from the implementation through optimization to scaling

Vue Storefront provides superb developer experience and is loved by developers. The solution is currently empowering 2,200+ live stores across the globe and has a community of over 19,000 people.

Leverage composable commerce with your current suite software and turn months of re-platforming into weeks.

See how Rapala went headless with Vue Storefront.