That’s the question e-commerce business owners ask us before deciding whether to go headless. Going headless is the best decision you can make. The headless approach is about the solution of decoupling the front end and the back end. This e-commerce model allows you, as a business owner, to optimize any part of your website without worrying about downtime or poor performance.
While there are advantages to it, such as improved website performance, there are several things you need to consider, depending on your business model, before you make a move.
How to Know If Headless E-Commerce Is The Best Fit For Your Business
Should you go headless? It all comes down to the size of your business. What classifies you as a business and can you provide an estimate of your input, output, and current value?
Identifying Your Business Size
The size of your current e-commerce business is the #1 contributing factor that determines if you have the capacity to go headless.
Business Size refers to the scale of business operation that determines the level of production, sales volume, and revenue. Start by identifying the class to which your business belongs. Going headless is a difficult decision that requires planning.
Typically, there are three classes of business size:
- Small-sized Businesses
- Medium-sized Businesses
- Large Enterprises
Each of these varies in terms of business output, marketing, and, most important, revenue.
Why’s Revenue Important For Going Headless?
Revenue is the most vital part of going headless because it’s expensive in terms of implementation. A recent survey from WP Engine shows the average amount enterprises spend on the full implementation of headless technology architecture is $2.6million. This number is predicted to grow as more vendors and adopters enter the headless space.
Based on revenue, not many companies will be able to go headless even if they want to—all of this is primarily due to their business size. Before we break this down, let’s look at different business sizes and their average revenue.
Small-Sized Businesses
The classification of small-sized businesses starts with the number of employees ranging from 0-100. In this size of business, the average revenue is between $5—$10 million. For e-commerce businesses like this, going headless is difficult. Many will likely not invest in the process, as marketing alone takes about 12% of total revenue. Then, the business has to incur all other overhead and operating expenses.
All of these leave little to no room for a business in this class to easily deduct $2.6 million from its initial revenue without suffering significant financial setbacks.
Medium-sized Businesses
E-commerce businesses in the medium-sized classification have employees ranging from 101-500 employees. Based on the number of employees in this business setting, revenue is higher and ranges between $10 million and $1 billion.
Going headless with a business this size is less demanding compared to small-sized ones. The revenue is much larger to take on the average cost of a headless implementation without suffering a significant financial setback.
Large Enterprises
Businesses that fall within the large enterprises’ umbrella have an employee count of over 1000 with revenue over $1 billion. Examples of large enterprise companies include Amazon, Shopify, Alibaba, eBay, Walmart, and Rakuten.
Companies like these are the best candidates for going headless because they have the revenue capacity to go headless and maintain it entirely—without setbacks in terms of finances, performance, and output.
Based on this WP Engine survey, the stats are in favor of large enterprises on all sides, including business size, function, and revenue.
With all of these, taking your e-commerce business solely depends upon available revenue. So if you’re starting as a new e-commerce business owner, going headless isn’t the best choice until you’ve built your business to be medium-sized at least.
The decisions you make in a small-sized e-commerce business and a large enterprise are different in many ways. For example, if you run a small-sized business, your goal is to save while expecting maximum return with minimal investments. The reason for this is because budget is a critical influencing factor in the majority of your financial decisions.
In the case of medium or large enterprises, performance is a significant concern. Companies in this class already have the traffic to keep their revenue going, so their main concern is directed toward performance. In WP Engine’s survey on the adoption of headless technology for companies, 41% of them chose it solely because of performance—which is the core basis of headless technology.
Whether you’re looking for advanced solution features, easy-to-use web application, or a cost-effective platform for your e-commerce business, it all comes down to your business’ classification.
Knowing how your business is classified and how your needs fit in with the associated “norms” will guide you in choosing the best technology solutions for your business.
When choosing technology solutions, in this case, headless e-commerce, deciding which platform will be the best fit for your business can be daunting.
4 Things to Consider Before Choosing A Headless E-Commerce Platform
After deciding to move headless, choosing the best vendor is a primary concern. Working with the wrong platform can crumble your business, especially if they lack things like customer support to help you out when you run into trouble. To help you make an informed decision, we’ve identified four things to consider.
1. Easy Scalability and Customization
The great thing about going headless is that it provides the freedom to customize your website. This is the same for scalability because as your website grows, there needs to be a way to handle it effectively while delivering optimum performance. Ensure your headless e-commerce platform of choice has a reliable, fast API that provides scalability and easy customizations. Integrating third-party apps and real-time updates must also be available to aid overall scalability without needing additional developers.
Related Article: How Next-Generation Headless Helps E-Commerce Businesses in 2022
2. Effective Customer Support and User Guide
When you choose a headless platform, the effectiveness and availability of their customer support should be your primary concern. This is because going headless is a custom-built technology and requires an expert developer to fix any problem you run into. In the case of a holiday season traffic surge, for example, having a customer support team ready to help will prevent crashing.
The same also goes for user guides, e.g., blog posts, covering all parts of the headless platform extensively and then using them effectively for better results.
3. Ease of Use
Taking a business headless is for easier management of the front and back end, with neither depending on each other for proper functioning. Using a platform that offers easy management lets you focus more on improving customer experiences rather than your store’s development process on the back end. Ask about the installation process to see if it’s a good fit for your e-commerce business.
4. Security
The decoupled framework on which headless e-commerce is built is one of its most significant advantages over the traditional e-commerce process. Ensure the headless platform you choose provides top-notch security for your store to avoid risks of cyber-attacks and database failure or loss. Additionally, compliance is necessary for security and customer data protection. Make sure the platform you choose is compliant with GDPR and PCI regulations. For payment security, ensure compliance with PSD2 and SCA regulations.
We found a headless e-commerce solution that fits all of the above criteria and much more—Edgemesh Server.
Next-Generation Headless with Edgemesh Server
Choosing a platform to take your e-commerce business headless is challenging. That’s why we believe going headless should be with a single click.
With Edgemesh Server, you can enable one-click headless performance for your e-commerce websites. We provide seamless web acceleration to give headless-style deployments with zero developer effort. This allows us to eliminate high costs, risks, and an unpredictable timeline that plagues headless e-commerce migrations.
We also understand your fear of having to rebuild your existing website when you go headless. Unlike other complex legacy headless projects, Edgemesh Server is fully automated and takes only minutes to set up—without losing your front end.
Benefits of Edgemesh Server include:
- A seamless integration that works with the existing platform and takes only minutes to set up, unlike the months-long process of traditional headless implementations.
- Significant performance improvements, providing 4x overall faster site speed and 10x fast server response time for an accelerated customer experience.
- Complete control over the user experience and flexibility to extend beyond the current platform's limitations, with the ability to add additional pages such as JAMStack, React, and Next.js.
- Enterprise-grade user experience extensions like A/B testing, personalization, and Bot protection enhance any platform without requiring a complete design.
Now’s The Time To Take Your Business Headless
Once you’ve identified your business class, deciding to go headless is easy. If your business class can readily take on the cost of going headless, the time to make that move is now. Headless e-commerce comes with lots of advantages such as better performance, quicker time to market, faster time to value, and seamless integrations—all of which give your customers the best experience.
Recent stats show that more than 90% of enterprise organizations not currently using headless plan to evaluate headless solutions over the next 12 months. With the adoption of this size, getting in early is to your advantage.
Edgemesh Server offers one-click installation and a 5-minute set-up—no developers needed. Get started now.
If you made it to the end of this article, then you’d be interested in the rest of this series.
Below are related articles we think you’ll find helpful:
How Going Headless Helps E-Commerce Business in 2022
Difference Between Server-Side and Client-Side Caching, And Which Is Good For Your Website
What is Start Render Time, and How Can You Improve It?
5 Reasons Why Client-Side Caching Is Best For Your E-Commerce Website
What Role Does CRO Play In Your Growth Strategy
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