eCommerce Customer Pain Points (And How Headless Commerce Solves Them)
As thousands of new sellers open online stores every day, marketers are starting to see new eCommerce pain points. These new pain points appear at each stage of the buyer’s journey, creating issues that, if not solved, can drastically reduce the potential of every eCommerce store out there.
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The eCommerce industry has seen steady and rapid growth in the last few years, especially after the events of 2020. According to Statista research, eCommerce revenue is expected to show an annual growth rate of 6.29% over the next four years, resulting in a projected $3.5B by 2025.
With such rapid growth and thousands of new sellers opening online stores every day, marketers are starting to see new eCommerce pain points. These new pain points appear at each stage of the buyer’s journey, creating issues that, if not solved, can drastically reduce the potential of every eCommerce store out there.
The key to alleviating these pain points starts with analyzing your current customer experience and auditing your online store to determine where you could improve your buyer journey. Is it the checkout process, your user experience, or your product description? By analyzing your store, you can uncover the issues and improve how customers interact with your eCommerce site.
Luckily, several eCommerce pain points can be solved by implementing a headless commerce solution. Therefore, in this article, we will show you some of the most common pain points online retailers have and how headless eCommerce solutions can help you solve them.
10 eCommerce Pain Points
Maintaining customer satisfaction is always paramount for eCommerce stores and online retailers, but sometimes the platform you’re using might be doing you more harm than good. To help you navigate through the murky waters of eCommerce platform implementation, we share with you 10 of the most common eCommerce pain points and how a headless eCommerce solution can boost your marketplace.
We will focus on three types of pain points: financial, technical, and marketing.
Financial Pain Points
High Maintenance Costs
Building a custom eCommerce solution with workarounds, hacks, and plugins costs money. Headless implementations are often more streamlined than traditional eCommerce platforms and make the rollout of new features easier.
Paying for Features You Don’t Use
This is another issue that many users of traditional platforms face. Sometimes, traditional platforms offer a myriad of features that cater to an extensive and varied range of users. While this is great for people with nondescript needs, it might not be great if you already have a tech stack or particular needs that require specific tools rather than generic ones.
Difficulty Entering New Markets
For eCommerce stores and vendors, entering new markets is always a good idea, especially when it comes to selling goods. Traditional platforms limit how much you can scale and how easy it is for you to create localized content or deliver content in different languages from a single source of truth.
Technical Pain Points
The eCommerce Platform Has Grown Unstable
You know how it is. You add a plugin, then add another, and when you look at your installation, you have thirty different plugins and have forgotten what each one does. An excess of third-party plugins causes instability and sharply reduces your eCommerce site’s performance. Plus, with traditional platforms, each new update brings unforeseen issues that generate more instability.
Handling New Data Has Become Hard
Each eCommerce site manages a huge number of stock-keeping units (SKUs) and chances are that your database can’t really handle the load, putting a strain on your logistics process. A headless commerce platform can help you manage things better and with less dependence on old databases or aging technologies.
Marketing Pain Points
Lack of Search Functionality
Not having a good search function can make it hard for your shoppers to actually find your products. Traditional eCommerce platforms aren’t usually well optimized for search or lack advanced search functionality.
Can’t Deliver Mobile Commerce Experience
More than half of the users browse the internet using mobile devices, and not having a mobile commerce platform will surely spell doom for your brand. Headless commerce platforms are mobile-ready and enable you to create an experience once and publish it anywhere, be it a mobile phone, a piece of digital signage, or to Alexa.
No Granular Personalization
For an eCommerce business owner, personalizing each and every shopping experience is a must. Traditional platforms make personalization a pain and often require you to integrate third-party tools, which will contribute to feature bloat.
Unclear and Non-Actionable Analytics
Traditional platforms are often hindered by a lack of comprehensive analytics that span the whole supply chain. Headless commerce platforms usually offer more choices and more data so you can understand both your products and your customers. Also, due to their API-first nature, headless platforms integrate better with standalone analytics solutions without causing software bloat.
Headless Commerce To The Rescue
If one thing is certain, online stores need to be adaptive and change fast to stay current in the changing eCommerce environment.
With a traditional eCommerce solution, you’re constrained by your frontend’s capabilities and the tools your platform supports. The headless approach enables you to leverage the best-of-breed approach to create a modular tech stack that suits your specific needs.
Headless commerce is an approach to eCommerce that leverages the capabilities of a headless or decoupled backend, especially when it comes to its inherent omnichannel content delivery capabilities. By separating the frontend —or presentation layer— from the backend, marketers and developers gain more flexibility to both build and present shopping experiences using APIs. Headless commerce gives brands and eCommerce stores a series of advantages. Let’s take a look at them:
- Faster websites: Headless commerce platforms enable you to build static websites that are faster to build and serve, improving your Google search rankings.
- Fits well with designer workflows: With the headless approach, designers can work independently and update your eCommerce store design without IT professionals.
- Integrability: Headless commerce solutions are API-first, which means that they’re easy to integrate with third-party software via APIs.
- Enhanced scalability: Scalable servers enable headless platforms to adapt to serve more customers during peak hours or heavy shopping periods and then go back to normal operations after the peak has passed.
- Personalization: Headless platforms enable marketers to deliver personalized shopping experiences to each consumer.
- Improved analytics: With a headless commerce platform, you can collect and leverage customer data and create relevant content and digital experiences across multiple customer journeys for a context-based shopping experience.
No More eCommerce Pain Points with Salsita
Traditional platforms are ill-equipped to deliver the omnichannel marketing experiences that today’s customers need and crave. But spotting the pain points that surround a bad eCommerce experience can be hard without a pair of trained eyes to guide you through the potential implementation issues.
A comprehensive eCommerce audit can help you determine the problems underlying your current implementation and how your platform can be damaging your store’s operations. Our eCommerce experts at Salsita can help you diagnose your eCommerce performance issues and develop a plan to address and resolve any potential issue.
By doing an x-ray scan of your operations, we can tell you what needs to be improved and give you a playbook, so you take your store to the next level.
Daniel Backhaus - Chief Strategy Officer
If you want to learn more about our eCommerce audits, read more here: 56-Point eCommerce Audit Checklist: Is Your Current Tech Stack Enough?
