The e-commerce industry is booming and growing steadily. According to forecasts, 95% of shopping will be facilitated by e-commerce by 2040. What does this mean for you and your online shop? First of all, you should look for a future-proof e-commerce management solution that lets you keep up with the market – or maybe even be one step ahead!

Many companies have already replaced their older shop software with newer solutions known as headless e-commerce systems. In this blog post, we're going to talk more about these systems, how they complement each other, and how they can help you remain flexible and scalable in the long term.

What is headless e-commerce?

Many online stores have a monolithic e-commerce system in place that consists of a back-end and a connected front-end. In general, the back-end serves as an administration interface through which you can create and manage the content and data of your shop. When a user visits your online shop, they see the front-end of the system used – also known as the presentation layer.

However, the connection between these two parts has one significant disadvantage, namely if you want to supply IoT devices, native apps, and other endpoints with your product data. And this is where headless systems come in to save your day!

In short, headless e-commerce, also called decoupled e-commerce, consists only of the back-end part. This means that you can freely build UIs for any device and endpoint without being limited by a system's front-end requirements. Then, you can feed your channels with data from a RESTful API.

Why combine headless e-commerce with a headless CMS?

You probably also have heard about headless content management systems and may be wondering how they differ from headless e-commerce solutions. Let's get this question out of the way.

What is a headless CMS anyway? Just like a headless e-commerce system, this type of content management system isn't coupled to a front-end. Here, too, you can develop tailored UIs for your native apps, websites, and IoT devices and provide them with data from the CMS via an API.

Now, this sounds exactly like a headless e-commerce system, doesn't it? Well, not necessarily – the differences mainly depend on the solution used. Usually, decoupled e-commerce solutions are developed for one purpose: managing products and trade-related things like orders, shipping, inventory, etc. With headless CMSs, on the other hand, you can create and manage any kind of content and its structure.

While there are still some dedicated headless e-commerce systems today, many headless CMSs also offer e-commerce functions. By combining the two types, you can leverage the features required for your online shop and manage all other content for any other platform that you operate. Let’s find out how you can benefit from this combo!

What are the benefits of a headless CMS for e-commerce?

In this digital age in which we live, we use many different apps and services every day. Businesses strive to use as few applications as possible to reduce costs and keep workflows transparent and straightforward. Instead of having three different content management systems for your blog, e-commerce site, and native app, you can combine them with a headless CMS in a central content hub.

Therefore, you only have to create content once in your central content hub and can then deliver it to any channel and endpoint. Additionally, most headless CMSs let you define the structure of content types to your liking. So, for example, a blog post requires different data than a product, and a headless CMS ensures that you can build effective content structures for these types. With our headless CMS ContentChef, you can define the structure and fields of any content type by creating rich product and content models in JSON or using the visual editor. As a result, your developers can retrieve tailored content through a RESTful API and provide data to the channel's user interface.

Ultimately, a headless CMS can help you reduce your product's time-to-market by shortening development and content management times. Additionally, your designers and developers can focus on their craft instead of dealing with the operational burdens of a more traditional CMS. We wrote a blog post about the benefits of a headless CMS for business owners, developers, and designers – go and check it out to learn more! How ContentChef simplifies e-commerce and digital content management ContentChef helps you create and manage your e-commerce products and other content types effectively. As mentioned above, developers can create tailor-made content structures using our intuitive schema language or visual editor. In this way, you can create and structure content precisely as required, be it products for your shop, blog posts for your website, or other data for IoT devices.

Additionally, you can use ContentChef for Product Information Management (PIM). This means you can create and manage your product information and catalogs in a single place, and then deliver it to the channels you want.

Provide your customers with unique and tailor-made experiences, regardless of the device or channel on which they browse your goods and content. One way to do this is to connect different types of content with your products. For example, you can display assembly instructions next to your products or display fitting recipes for a particular food. As a result, you can save your users valuable time by offering them further relevant content in the right places.

Conclusion

A headless CMS can help you improve your content management efforts, whether you're running an online store, blog, native app, or everything together. Save time and money by managing content in one place, building rich product models, and distributing content to any channel using an API. At the end of the day, your customers and company will enjoy the flexibility and scalability that comes with a headless CMS like ContentChef for headless e-commerce.

Why don't you give ContentChef a try and see for yourself how it can help you create and manage products for your online store? Sign up for a 30-day trial – no credit card required!