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The main future metric for headless eCommerce platforms

operational efficiency as metric for headless commerce

The eCommerce industry has transformed over the last few years. Progressively companies are going headless for example they’re using a headless eCommerce platform to manage their eCommerce operations. Direct to Consumer (D2C)/Business to Consumer (B2C) brands are hunting for fast, innovative, and tech-driven approaches which make headless commerce essential. In this blog post, we’ll explore how operational efficiency will be the future metric for headless eCommerce platforms. If you’ve moved to headless or are planning towards headless transition then this article will serve as the best guide for you.

In this blog post you’ll learn:

– Why operational efficiency is key for headless eCommerce platforms

– How can operational efficiency be measured?

– How can you optimize your business for maximum operational efficiency?

Headless commerce and its impact on business teams

The first thing we need to talk about however is what headless eCommerce is. Typically, traditional eCommerce platforms have their basis on top of a monolithic architecture. The backend and frontend are tightly coupled. 

However, as smartphones have grown more popular, many people use them for browsing products they may want or are interested in instead of computers at home or work which means that retailers needed something different — this was when headless commerce came into play! A headless commerce setup means that the frontend is completely dissociated from the backend and communication between both ends occurs through APIs.

Impact of headless eCommerce on business teams

With headless eCommerce platforms, business teams no longer need to worry about what channels their customers are using. They’re also able to focus more on customer’s needs and less time on operations which makes them happier in turn — but if all goes well then operational efficiency should be the main metric.

In order to make this happen as smoothly as possible, we need technologies such as API management tools like Kong Enterprise: they provide seamless integration between APIs of various systems from backend storage services through third-party applications by managing requests coming from clients and responses

The headless movement actually turns the core eCommerce functionality into a commodity. This means you can’t tell the difference between companies just by looking at what their eCommerce platform offers.

Operational efficiency in headless eCommerce

The future metric for headless eCommerce platforms will be operational efficiency, which is a combination of productive developers and autonomous business teams. Productive developers are the team members who work in an efficient manner to implement features that benefit customers (autonomous business teams are those without any hand-holding or oversight). We want engineers to focus on working together with other engineers and not worry about all of the nitty-gritty tasks like deployments, monitoring performance metrics, and so on. Business people should have autonomy as well because they’re ultimately responsible for making decisions that drive revenue based on customer needs.

This will shift the demand towards offerings that make this commodity functionality accessible, consumable, and provide value-adds.

Here are some of the challenges companies going headless will face in a few years: happy developers but unhappy business teams as operational efficiency becomes the main metric for success.

To avoid these problems, eCommerce businesses ought to adopt best practices like continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tooling so they can adhere to a modern development methodology without having to start from scratch — or else develop their own CI/CD process using more traditional enterprise software engineering tools.

When eCommerce industry will move towards headless systems what products will be in demand

Digital customer experience is a differentiator and crucial success factor. Products that will use Progressive Web Apps (PWA) will be in demand. When frontend templates are easily customizable, then the sky’s the limit to creativity. In this way, developers won’t need to make small changes since the content management team can effectively manage them. It’s not the product but the customized frontend that will attract more consumers for each type of product. Brands like Airbnb, Twitter, BMW, and Starbucks are already using this technology. So, it can be concluded that a diverse range of products will be in demand while moving towards headless eCommerce. Here are the key points that need to be considered:

  • Successful businesses will be those that deliver optimal customer experiences and focus on operational efficiency
  • Companies going headless will face an uphill battle when it comes to adopting CI/CD processes, which are important for developers but not always intuitive for business teams
  • The adoption of best practices such as continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tooling is key to avoid the problems companies going headless may experience in a few years with unhappy business teams and happy developers without any real product changes or results — only because they were able to set up CI/CD process faster than their competitors

Let’s see how eCommerce companies can get there in 3 steps:

  1. Start measuring operational efficiency
  2. Ensure developers are happy and productive by making CI/CD workflows a top priority
  3. Adopt the best practices of successful headless eCommerce platforms that have lead to autonomous business teams with happier customers

With these 3 steps in mind, eCommerce won’t just be about customer experience, it’ll also be about operational efficiency — which is where the future metric for success lies.

Summary

With your headless commerce platform, you can create streamlined and efficient eCommerce operations. To be sure that the process is as efficient as possible, it’s important to measure how much time is being spent on each task in order to prioritize which tasks need more attention or consideration. eCommerce retention-focused business model will be the new norm in the very dynamic market. If you optimize your operations for maximum operational efficiencies, then this will provide better customer experiences across all touchpoints of the company.

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