9 Headless CMS That Are Ideal for Headless Commerce

According to BigCommerce, 34.5% of shopping interactions are conducted using mobile devices. The world of eCommerce is growing and with the enormous surge in online shopping we witnessed in 2020, that number is likely to keep rising. As Statista points out, by 2023, global eCommerce sales could reach close to the $7 trillion mark.

Unfortunately, traditional eCommerce platforms aren't well-suited for the omnichannel approach marketers need to be able to stay afloat in today’s changing climate. The headless architecture, on the other hand, was created with the omnichannel approach in mind.

In this article, we’ll dive into the waters of headless commerce and show you nine headless CMS that can help you tap into the power of headless commerce in 2021.

What Is Headless Commerce?

With consumers getting content and making purchases from different touchpoints such as IoT devices, smartwatches, and progressive web apps, a traditional CMS will struggle to keep up with the different channels.

Headless commerce has emerged as an approach that leverages the headless or decoupled CMS's omnichannel capabilities and brings them to the eCommerce market. By separating the frontend presentation layer and the backend, marketers and developers gain more flexibility to build and present content to different devices using APIs.

Here are some of the advantages of this headless architecture for eCommerce stores:

• Static sites are faster to serve, which improves Google Lighthouse scores and search rankings
• The headless approach fits well with designer workflows for updates to the site’s design
• Easy to integrate with third-party APIs
• Enhanced scalability that enables stores to serve more clients during heavy shopping periods

Through a headless commerce architecture, stores open themselves to a whole new world of customization and personalization. With a headless commerce platform, you can leverage customer data and create relevant content and digital experiences across multiple customer journeys, resulting in a meaningful, context-based experience.

Why Are Headless CMS Ideal for eCommerce?

eCommerce stores need to be adaptive and change fast to fit the needs of their customers. With a traditional commerce platform, you are limited to the frontend capabilities supported by the platform. With the headless approach, you can use any best-of-breed frontend framework to create a highly personalized consumer experience that works across multiple channels.

A headless CMS supports new emerging technologies making it ideal for eCommerce retailers that want to future-proof themselves. It also gives teams the tools to create and deploy customer experiences with ease and modify marketing campaigns for specific events in a pinch.

When it comes to choosing a platform that facilitates headless commerce, these are some of the main features you have to look for in a headless CMS:

• REST and GraphQL APIs
• Framework agnosticism
• Best-of-breed approach
• Robust third-party integrations
• Multilingual and multisite capabilities
• Digital asset management
• Extensibility and integrability
• Integrated CDN
• Solid content management workflows such as content modeling, designing, and approval

Finally, a headless CMS is an ideal choice if you:

• Have a content-driven marketing strategy
• Want to implement deeper personalization
• Have an omnichannel marketing strategy
• Have a multisite or global eCommerce store
• Have separate websites for each channel and want to merge them

Now let's take a look at nine headless CMS that can help take your eCommerce store to the next level.

9 Headless CMS That Are Ideal for Headless Commerce

Amplience

Amplience is an API-first headless CMS for enterprise retail that enables eCommerce capabilities by integrating with third-party tools like Mobify and commercetools. Amplience enables a better way to execute headless experience management by creating, scheduling, and planning content to be presented by the eCommerce platform.

Contentful

Contentful’s API-first architecture enables eCommerce marketers to easily add a commerce layer to any website using their headless CMS coupled with a static site generator. By integrating with third-party tools like commercetools and CommerceLayer, Contentful provides the tools to accelerate content creation and development processes.

Crafter CMS

Crafter CMS is a frontend agnostic CMS that can render markup or serve content via API using your preferred framework on top of Crafter’s headless content server. Crafter offers native GraphQL support and dynamically manages schemas to help users build content-enabled apps and eCommerce sites using a web service architecture in any programming language.

dotCMS

dotCMS is an open-source hybrid CMS with an API-first infrastructure created to cater to non-technical and technical users alike. dotCMS CaaS offer makes managing content, images, and assets simple. The hybrid CMS also has intranet capabilities that can be integrated with any frontend to deliver omnichannel experiences.

Contentstack

Contentstack is an API-based headless solution that can be integrated with third-party tools to enhance its eCommerce capabilities. For example, marketers can integrate it with commercetools and trigger a webhook that updates certain fields and product details in Contentstack. Also, storefront APIs can deliver content to different channels and send push notifications to consumers to alert them about new items and inventory changes.  

GraphCMS

GraphCMS is a GraphQL-native headless platform capable of headless commerce. The platform is highly extensible with other third-party tools and APIs, making it possible to turn GraphCMS into a headless commerce system by connecting its backend to other tools to build a highly customized system particular for that use case.

Sanity

Sanity is a fully customizable open-source React-based headless CMS. With Sanity, retailers can distribute a single source of truth to any channel, device, or product using APIs and powerful integrations. Sanity is frontend agnostic, which means that it can be integrated with any framework and library to build solid commerce experiences.

Strapi

Strapi is a Node.js-based open-source CMS created for JavaScript users. Strapi consumes API from different frameworks and libraries as well as IoT devices using REST and GraphQL to build any kind of UI and distribute it to any device or channel. Strapi is also database agnostic, which means that users can leverage SQLite, MongoDB, MySQL, or Postgres... just pick the one you like.

Uniform

Uniform is a centralized hub that combines with other existing WCMs and DXPs to ‘Jamstackify’ your websites and eCommerce stores and increase their performance. Uniform delivers highly personalized content to visitors enabling marketers to create dynamic experiences without tinkering with the code.

Looking for a Headless Commerce Implementation Partner?

In today's omnichannel and multiplatform world, a headless CMS is the foundation for a headless commerce experience that keeps your consumers hooked. A decoupled CMS that's frontend agnostic can help you build SPAs and PWAs using any framework for maximum flexibility.

While the headless commerce approach might not be right for every store, if you believe that it is the next step in your digital transformation journey, finding the right partner to help you is the best way to get started.

Building a headless commerce platform shouldn't be a problem if you have the right partners by your side. From the simplest catalog to the most complex eCommerce implementation, Salsita can help. We deliver consistent and stable products capable of handling large-order volumes with maximum uptime and supporting omnichannel marketing initiatives.

Visit our eCommerce site to learn more about our capabilities.