Headless Commerce vs Traditional Commerce: How to Choose (2024)

Learn the differences between headless and traditional commerce to help you decide on the best site architecture for your brand.

When evaluating the appropriate architecture on which to build your omnichannel business, many people pit headless commerce against traditional commerce. It’s one versus the other.

But the truth is, alternative combinations exist.

Rather than an either-or decision, it’s about selecting the platforms, systems, and tools to deliver custom commerce experiences anywhere in the world, which often requires marrying both headless and traditional commerce.

Ahead, you’ll learn the differences between headless and traditional commerce and how to decide on the best site architecture for your brand.

What is the difference between headless and traditional ecommerce?

In short, headless ecommerce platforms separate the front end from the back end, where functions like inventory management and payment processing live. It allows developers to create customer user experiences through APIs. 

With headless commerce, you can create omnichannel experiences that cater to your brand needs and customer expectations. Say you want to create more personalized shopping experiences. With headless architecture, you could integrate AI and machine learning to analyze customer behavior and display personalized product recommendations in real time, across any device. 

A traditional commerce platform pairs the front- and back-end systems together. This means the platform's built-in templates and functionalities predetermine how your site works. It's easy to set up, a bit more straightforward, and less customizable. Headless requires a bit more investment and a more complex setup. 

The sweet spot for enterprises is a blended platform. More retailers are turning to the blending approach because it delivers faster time to market, cost-effectiveness, and a better customer experience. Data shows that:

• 29% of companies are using full-stack commerce platforms.
• 91% of companies currently using full-stack commerce platforms are moving to a blended SaaS commerce platform.
• 74% of companies currently using blended SaaS commerce platforms are moving to a fully headless and modular SaaS commerce platform.
• 27% of companies using fully headless and modular SaaS ecommerce platforms

Headless ecommerce explained

The headless commerce concept involves decoupling the front end from the back end of the store. The “head” refers to anything the buyer interacts with, while the “body” refers to the back end. Because the front and back ends interact through API layers, headless commerce is often called API-first. 

Unlike traditional commerce, where the front end and back end are tightly integrated, custom storefronts provide more flexibility and control over the user interface and user experience. 

You can build a headless storefront with Shopify’s stack, which includes:

• Storefront API: A headless API layer that enables high-performance access to Shopify commerce primitives, such as pricing, subscriptions, markets, optimized carts, and more, to build any custom experience.
• Hydrogen and Oxygen: Shopify’s official headless development stack consists of Hydrogen and Oxygen. Hydrogen is an opinionated, yet modular toolkit that includes commerce-optimized components, hooks, and utilities that are pre-configured for Shopify’s APIs. Hydrogen storefronts can be hosted on any platform, but Oxygen represents the fastest and easiest way to do so.

Traditional ecommerce explained

You can launch your online store with a predesigned theme on a platform like Shopify, which offers a bunch of themes that are customizable and professional. You don't have to write a single line of code to create an effective storefront with its user-friendly interface. 

For example, with a traditional ecommerce platform, you could customize:

• Color schemes
• Page structure 
• Product display options
• Blog layout
• Font styles

But traditional commerce platforms are evolving. In 2021, Shopify announced Online Store 2.0, which represented a major upgrade to its already-popular ecommerce platform. Improvements included theme app extensions with app blocks, meta fields without an API, and a Liquid input setting so businesses can add custom Liquid code directly to pages.

Businesses looking for a little extra flexibility to build their storefront experiences leverage Liquid. With Liquid, you can build your own theme and quickly create a custom store with the exact look and feel you want.

Traditional vs. headless ecommerce: Pros and cons

Headless commerce is becoming more and more popular because of its potential benefits. 

By going headless, developers can use composable tech stacks and best-of-breed commerce tools. For brand marketers, headless architecture promises a new level of creative freedom, unlike monolithic ecommerce platforms.

Let’s weigh out the pros and cons of each. 

Headless pros

According to an Accenture report, companies that implement headless commerce see a 30% increase in revenue due to expanded product offerings and enhanced customer experience. 

Other benefits of headless commerce include:

• Getting to market faster: Splitting content from code allows front- and back-end work to be done simultaneously in the environment of their choice which results in faster deployments
• Increased personalization: Go beyond ecommerce themes to flexibly build tailored customer experiences wherever your customers are
• Increased control: Build a custom enterprise architecture with powerful APIs that integrate your tech stack, all in the programming language of your choice.

It’s reasons like this that prompted Nour Hammer to implement a headless solution. The brand needed a way to tell stories in an elevated way. Using headless architecture, Nour Hammour built an immersive experience through video and storytelling, blending their content with commerce via product data synchronization between Shopify and Sanity CMS.

The brand launched their new online store just in time for Paris Fashion Week and saw their year-over-year conversion rate up 63% and corresponding sales up 128%.

👉Read Nour Hammour’s story

Headless cons

There are a lot of benefits to headless commerce, but not all businesses need to replatform. Businesses looking to go headless should consider: 

• Potential costs: The pricing for an enterprise headless project could cost anywhere from thousands to millions upfront, plus annual maintenance costs. It depends on your site’s functionality, level of customization, and supporting tools. If you work with an external agency, those fees can add up quickly, too. 

• Increased complexity: Headless architectures are much more complex versus traditional, monolithic setups. Instead of running a query and putting the results in a form element, headless apps need to assemble the information and store it in an API. Adding more code at every step makes it easier to make mistakes.

Traditional pros

A traditional, monolithic architecture also has its benefits:

• Easy to deploy: Since everything is bundled into one application, initial setup is easier than deploying a headless commerce architecture. 

• Straightforward troubleshooting: With all components tightly coupled, troubleshooting issues is more straightforward. There is only one, comprehensive log to trace errors and monitor application performance. 

• Easier to operate: Managing a traditional commerce site is less complicated. Updates, bug fixes, and new feature deployments are applied to a single codebase. 

Traditional cons 

Traditional commerce solutions also have their drawbacks: 

• Harder to scale: Monolithic structures provide stability and simplicity, but they lack agility. It’s harder to innovate and adapt to changing marketing conditions compared to distributed environments. 

• Tough to make changes or updates: It’s harder to modify or update specific functionalities without impacting the entire system. 

• Stuck with one technology: Monolithic systems constrain you to using existing technologies.

• Less reliable: If there’s an error in any module, it can affect your entire store.

Headless ecommerce examples

Ruggable 

Known for their two-piece machine washable rug system, Ruggable partners with Shopify to transform and scale their digital infrastructure. Shopify's robust APIs and checkout extensibility enabled a headless architecture that dramatically improved site speed, stability, SEO, and overall user experience. 

Ruggable achieved a number of notable milestones thanks to this collaboration, such as expanding to eight international markets, streamlining the checkout process, and having 100% uptime on Black Friday sales. 

👉Read Ruggable’s story

Sennheiser 

Audio equipment brand Sennheiser transitioned to Shopify with a headless architecture to overhaul their ecommerce strategy and engage with their global customer base. 

Initially, the brand struggled with an inflexible system that hindered quick adaptations and market expansions. The switch to headless empowered them to rapidly open in new markets and improve the customer experience. 

The adaptability of the headless architecture and Shopify's support for multichannel strategies empowered Sennheiser to connect with a broader audience through various platforms, including global marketplaces and social media channels. This strategic move resulted in:

• Establishing 25 headless stores
• Increasing conversion rate by 4.5%
• Shortening time to open a new market

👉Read Sennheiser’s story

Choosing between headless and traditional ecommerce

It's hard to determine if headless is right for your business. The biggest challenge is figuring out where to start. 

There are several key questions you should ask yourself if you're considering a headless storefront, including:

• Do you have the technical resources (internal or third-party agency) required to build and maintain a headless storefront? 
• What is the engineering opportunity cost?
• How much time will it take to replatform to a headless storefront?
• What are the biggest limitations of your current ecommerce setup?
• How comfortable are you with adopting new technologies and making changes to your existing infrastructure?
• What technical requirements need to be considered before implementing a new solution? 
• What additional features or functionalities would you like to have on your website that are currently missing?

Thousands of Shopify customers have migrated to headless architecture. Based on our experience, here are the common traits of a merchant who might choose traditional over a headless storefront.

Traditional storefront

Online store merchants don't have small budgets, but they need a storefront up and running on a tight timeline without the help of an internal development team. These customers tend to generate a lot of revenue online, but not enough to justify a headless system. 

• Overall revenue: $100-250 million in revenue

• Online revenue: Less than $20–$50 million in revenue. 

• Internal development resources: Typically utilizes an external agency for all development services

• Budget: Less than $1 million

• Timeline: Less than 6 months

Headless storefront

On the flip side, merchants that go headless tend to generate online revenues over $100 million, so building a custom storefront is easier to justify. Also, they have larger technology budgets, more flexible timelines, and tech teams who can help with the initial build and ongoing maintenance after the storefront launches.

• Overall revenue: $50–$150 million in revenue

• Online revenue: Greater than $50–$100 million in online revenue

• Internal development resources: Established internal technology and product teams with a strong vision and appetite for solving complex problems

• Budget: $1 million or more

• Timeline: 6 months or longer

Along with some of the high-level business considerations previously, you should audit your current commerce stack, information architecture, and mobile capabilities.

Shopify’s headless solutions offer businesses and developers the freedom to choose the right tools for the job and extend store capabilities with a composable stack of technologies. With Shopify’s headless solutions, you also get:

• Optionality: Shopify’s Enterprise plan delivers GTM agility with a hybrid platform that allows you to choose your build, whether headless, composable, or full-stack.

• Uncompromised GTM speed and control: Launch the fastest and most flexible storefront builds with Hydrogen and Liquid.

• Scalability: Shopify delivers world-class performance, with 99.9%+ uptime. There’s no amount of checkout traffic you can generate that we can’t handle—we’ve done 40,000 checkouts per minute with ease.

• Efficiency and low total cost of ownership: Shopify is the most operationally efficient platform in commerce, and transforms enterprises.

Shopify is your partner for headless commerce

Headless commerce is a fast-growing trend. It allows brands to create unique storefront experiences that are not possible with traditional ecommerce platforms. However, the low startup cost and setup make traditional commerce tools attractive.

Some 67% of companies are changing or planning to change their commerce architecture to prepare for the future. Are you one of them? 

Explore how a headless build can benefit your ecommerce business. Get in touch with us today.