“Quick wins” are music to our ears. To stay ahead, you need to move fast: test, learn, optimise, repeat. It used to be that commerce deployments were massive and intimidating, requiring major IT resources, long timelines, and big budgets. But with the constant pressure commerce leaders face to both innovate and be more efficient, that kind of investment doesn’t always fly.
Thanks to intelligent and flexible new technology, you have many options for implementation at your fingertips. What’s right for your business could mean quick iterative improvements, adding AI capabilities, mixing and matching headless and traditional ecommerce architecture, embedding commerce everywhere, or anything in between.
New channels are emerging constantly, and 83% of digital leaders are already expanding their channel strategies. How great would it be to embed AI-driven commerce in every touchpoint in the customer journey? Imagine a GPT-powered concierge that can bring the best parts of in-person shopping to every digital channel; service agents who can accept payments in the field with a Pay Now link; or supercharged merchants using generative AI to improve product descriptions. With a flexible platform, every step of the customer journey is your chance to maximise revenue, savings, and relationships.
Businesses must differentiate on customer experience. Take outdoor products manufacturer YETI, for example. To launch Drinkware Finder, its new immersive customer experience, YETI used a composable storefront to work untethered from traditional ecommerce design constraints, iterate quickly, and go live in less than two months.
Perhaps you want to focus your resources where they have the most impact by phasing your headless commerce transformation. Children’s furniture brand Stokke started by reimagining its checkout experience first. By working at its own speed, the Stokke team minimised risk and costs, and saw a 29% increase in checkout conversions. After a successful deployment, Stokke moved quickly to its next phase.
Whatever your business calls for, you can stay agile and get to market faster when your ecommerce architecture flexes with you.
Discover the storefront strategy that fits your business best with this decision tree.
When you need to get to market quickly or empower merchandisers or marketers with self-service tools, using predesigned templates is a good way to go. They give you a tried-and-true library of configurations like home pages, carts, checkouts, PLPs, and PDPs that you can implement quickly. From there, click-based merchandising tools and page editors let your teams build and update pages in minutes, even using generative AI to write product descriptions, and launch campaigns and promos without the help of the IT department.
The best platforms will also include preconfigured integrations such as Apple Pay, let you mix and match with composable storefronts, embed AI capabilities, and give you the flexibility to scale with your platform as your commerce needs grow. Downsides? Because templates are an out-of-the-box solution, they don’t provide the same level of agility as more composable solutions.
Composable storefronts are customisable storefronts built for headless commerce. In headless architectures, the head, or public-facing site your customers interact with, is detached from the body, or the back end, where data is collected and transactions are processed.
A composable storefront is fully customisable, letting you easily build the right set of components and functionality for your headless site. And there’s a huge bonus: The storefront operations — like hosting, securing, and scaling — are all managed on your behalf.
Composable commerce helps you operate more efficiently thanks to faster development cycles and the ability to make quick changes. You also maintain complete design and process freedom. And yes, you can deliver AI-powered customer experiences. Ultimately, composable storefronts reduce the cost and improve the ROI of building and managing a headless architecture.
Improve your storefront development process with headless commerce. Discover how on Trailhead, the free online learning platform from Salesforce.
and a headless architecture in just a few months. (Yes, it’s possible.)