Navigating the Commerce Landscape: Headless vs. Composable Commerce
In the ever-evolving world of ecommerce, choosing the right commerce technology for your project is getting more difficult. Headless has been around for 15 years now and is a known approach while composable has only been discussed for about half that time and is more nuanced. Over my 30+ years in commerce, I’ve seen a lot of trends come and go but interestingly, many of the things we were talking about in the late 90’s are still being discussed today. When I worked for Broadvision in the late 90’s 1:1 personalization was their big marketing position and that is again rising as a key topic due to the advent of AI.
There are nuances to both composable and headless approaches that further blur the lines and make it a difficult choice that the platform companies have no interest in helping their prospects differentiate. If you read the marketing positions of the major vendors, all are following the trend to say they are composable and many say they are both composable and headless! So, what’s the difference and why should you care when making a platform vendor decision?
Understanding Headless Commerce
Headless commerce decouples the front-end presentation layer from the back-end commerce functionality and traditionally the term focused solely on this separation. Essentially, it allows businesses to deliver content and shopping experiences across various channels, such as websites, mobile apps, IoT devices, and more, with the ability to share a backend transactional platform. In a pure headless environment, there would be no dependencies between the back-end and front-end. In practice, that full separation is difficult to achieve in a headless solution but possible in a composable solution.
With headless commerce, developers have the freedom to use any technology stack or programming language for the front end, enabling them to create highly customized and engaging user experiences. This flexibility fosters innovation and empowers businesses to adapt rapidly to changing market demands. It also meant that companies could hire front-end resources that were not specialized in any specific platform technology to speed development.
Exploring Composable Commerce
On the other hand, composable commerce, a term made ubiquitous by Gartner, describes a new way of building and deploying ecommerce solutions. Composable takes a modular approach, offering pre-built, specialized components that can be assembled like building blocks to create a tailored commerce solution. Each component, such as cart management, payment processing, or inventory management, operates independently but seamlessly integrates with other systems through APIs. The original theory was that you could mix and match the best services in each area for your commerce solution, even combining different services from different vendors. In practice, the industry has continued to sell in a more traditional model where you buy the services from a company focused on a specific area of commerce (more like a platform) that then makes them available for you to use as independent services.
Composable commerce enables businesses to create unique ecommerce experiences by combining technologies that align with their organizational goals.
Composable commerce platforms are intended to provide a balance between flexibility and efficiency, allowing businesses to leverage best-of-breed solutions while maintaining interoperability through standard API layers that allow the services to interact. Composable is broader than Headless in that it describes an architecture that is more inclusive than just the front-end. The hope is that this modular architecture enables rapid deployment, inherent scalability, and eliminates vendor lock so that businesses can focus on innovation and differentiation rather than infrastructure management.
Choosing the Right Approach
Now, the million-dollar question: which approach is right for your business? The answer lies in understanding your unique requirements, priorities, and long-term goals.
Consider Your Business Model: Evaluate your business model and determine the level of flexibility and customization you require. If you prioritize ease of development and want a quicker time to market, headless commerce might be the way to go. However, if you seek a balance between flexibility and efficiency, composable commerce could be a better fit.
Assess Technical Expertise: Assess your internal technical capabilities and resources. Composable commerce typically requires a lower level of technical expertise to manage and maintain, as developers can use whatever front-end technology they know and don’t have to worry about creating, integrating and maintaining micro-services. They can just focus on creating great front-end experiences. Composable commerce, on the other hand, forces more emphasis on a well thought out architecture and usually requires a team of full-stack developers to develop and maintain services that are not provided by composable platform vendors. There are also often more contracts to negotiate in a composable approach so a company must evaluate its ability to operate in a more complex environment.
Evaluate Scalability and Future-Proofing: Consider your scalability requirements and future growth plans. Headless commerce provides some level of initial scalability and flexibility, making it ideal for rapidly growing businesses with evolving needs. There is less initial complexity in headless but also less future flexibility. Composable commerce offers scalability and ultimate flexibility through modular components, allowing you to add or replace functionalities as your business expands.
Factor in Time to Market: Assess your time to market and agility requirements. Headless commerce enables rapid innovation and deployment, making it ideal for businesses that need to iterate quickly and stay ahead of the competition. Composable commerce offers accelerated time to market through pre-built components, reducing development time and complexity but usually takes a bit longer to get live, depending upon the approach taken to develop the solution. The one area where composable really shines is that it allows companies to take an incremental approach to re-platforming which is usually better for larger enterprises.
Conclusion
What I have noticed over the last 5 years is that companies choose headless if the CMO is making the decision and they are primarily a marketing-driven company. They tend to choose composable if the biggest influencer in the decision is the CTO and they are driven by a desire to differentiate their solution in the market or have a highly complex technical environment where composable allows for easier integration into their business.
Part of my consulting practice includes helping companies work through the platform selection process to make sense of their business and technical requirements and match them to the reality of what vendors are providing rather than the vendor’s marketing hype.