The 5 best headless commerce platforms

At Commerce Layer we believe that product content should not live in the commerce platform. This is not and will never be a great place for writers and marketing teams to work on content. The beauty of composability is to provide hyper-focused services for the best team possible. We focus on transactions and ecommerce developers.

Going headless means more code and more APIs to manage. Full customization will always come with more coding but you may not always have the luxury of long development time. At Commerce Layer, we offer no- and low-code solutions for when time is of the essence.

Factors like foreign government regulation, exchange rates, custom duties, taxes, and cultural differences can prevent merchants from participating in global commerce. Make sure that the solution that you pick will support a multi-market roadmap. With Commerce Layer you can accept orders in unlimited markets, with unlimited currencies, at no extra cost.

Promotions and discounts strategy are one of the most impactful growth factors for ecommerce. Do not let yourself be limited by what is offered by your commerce platform. Your commerce platform should allow you to build any discount logic that you want to test and delight your customers.

The optimal decision will be contingent upon the size of your business. If you operate as a very small business with limited resources, a no-code solution like Shopify is certainly recommended. However, it's essential to be aware that the limitations of Shopify will become evident rather quickly, leading to potential sacrifices in key areas such as customization, internationalization, and increasing cost per order.

For larger businesses, the decision typically revolves around choosing between headless architecture and monolithic architecture. Since headless stacks and MACH architectures are based on the Jamstack, it is necessary to have developers proficient in web coding skills. Your stack will be composed of various microservices that communicate through APIs, necessitating a solid understanding of these technologies among your developers, which should ideally be a standard skill set.

It is essential to carefully balance various costs to arrive at the most informed decision for your project. When evaluating a headless ecommerce stack, you have to sum the individual costs of each microservice, including CMS, OMS, Search, Catalog, DAM, among others.

However, by going composable, you also save costs in other fields:

First, you're lowering your technical debt: When going headless, you are actually looking for a greater ease of management, leading to reduced maintenance costs and fewer hindrances to your organization.

You're controling your license costs: Some licensing models tend to escalate over time. A composable stack lets you swap any service with another at any time, providing you with greater cost control and bargaining power.

You reduce implementation partner expenses: Monolithic solutions, as well as certain headless platforms like commercetools, may require you to hire an implementation partner. This additional cost can be nearly equivalent to your license fees over time.