As a business owner, if you want to survive in the digital age, sooner or later, you’ll need to bring your products online, and you’ll need the right eCommerce platform. In a tech-driven world, a compact and robust eCommerce platform helps you maintain a professional store.
Plus, it makes it easier to showcase your product line, ensure an impeccable shopping experience, and count a significant uptick in sales. Moreover, eCommerce platforms have centralized the efforts of businesses managing their inventory, offering customer support, and processing payments.
The genesis of headless commerce platforms
Headless technologies thrived thanks to Jamstack architectures. Jamstack relies on static websites decoupled from the backend and built using HTML/CSS. These sites are cached on CDNs, while dynamic components are powered by APIs with microservices. Since Netlify created the Jamstack method for web development, the number of Jamstack websites has doubled every year.
For ecommerce websites, Jamstack is paralleled by a similar strategic initiative called MACH: Microservices, API, Cloud-Native and Headless. In short, building digital experience with MACH comprises many microservices that interact via APIs.
Compared to traditional monolithic platforms, MACH service providers offer things like better performance, scalability, improved SEO, and freedom to build the best frontend experience possible.
Jamstack + MACH is the best possible architecture to build ecommerce sites that need to handle sophisticated commerce logics, unique designs, and high performances. Luckily, a number of microservices exist that can help any team accomplish these objectives. They include content management systems (or CMS), search, merchandising, payment gateways, checkout, product information management systems, digital asset managers, order fulfillment, and personalisation — and of course commerce backends.
Where this leaves the choice
Shopify and Adobe Commerce sit at opposite ends of the same trade-off. Shopify hands you a hosted, opinionated platform and asks you to work within it. Adobe Commerce hands you the source and asks you to staff it. Headless sits across both: you can put a decoupled storefront in front of either, and the question becomes which backend you want answering the API calls.
That decision is worth making on your own catalogue and integration list rather than on a ranking. We have written up what each platform actually costs to own, which is usually the more useful comparison.
If you want it worked through against your own stack, talk to us.
