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Chris Reddick, President and CEO of Clarity Ventures, and Ron Halversen, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity, talk about the difference between headless and decoupled eCommerce on auction platforms.

Part 2 of a 3-part series (Return to Part 1)

RON: Most of the examples we've given so far and that we're probably going to talk about the pros on this one, is on the front end. But for you and I being executives, let's say you and I had invested a few million in this custom auction website, but we weren't really involved in the day-to-day. What do you and I want to know what's going on? 

Well, wouldn't it be great in our corporate dashboard where we track sales ads and everything else, to pull how many active auctions do we have? What were the sales today? How many? We could literally go in via that API call and pull out any of the reporting data that we want and expose that in our corporate management dashboard as executives.

what is hipaa

RON: So it's not only the front end and being able to share this across omnichannel eCommerce platform, it really is on the back end of the management, too. And as Chris just said, when you start getting into partners, isn't it nice if you're cross-selling and cross-promoting, how many sales have come in from the cross-partner sharing, and you're starting to track some different advertising and things like that, you want to be able to get to that information very granularly. And that's really what we're talking about here.  

So let's talk about some of the pros of the platform. And I think the big one, for the front end that we've been mostly talking about is the devices, right? We can embed that software capability across the physical devices. If you want, go ahead and talk about some of those devices and I'd like you to also talk and introduce decoupled UI, because I think a lot of times at least some of the clients that I've spoken to: When they hear headless eCommerce, it scares the living daylights out of them because they're like, great, I can embed it. But now if you don't have a UI for some of this stuff, I have to go build out all the UI elements myself, right? So there is a difference between headless and decoupled. And I'd like you, as you go through this, to also talk about that.

CHRIS: Yeah, that's a great point. There's a difference between having an opinion and then having a requirement. Basically, the way that headless eCommerce solutions are set up is it literally has a requirement that you just build everything with your UI from scratch. Now, a lot of the platforms out there have figured out that they need to have templates and baseline standards. This becomes what we would call decoupled where they have an opinion, but it's not a requirement.

what is hipaa

CHRIS: Non-headless eCommerce and non-headless auction platforms have a requirement in that you have to start from whatever UI they've built that everything is tied to. So that's probably worse than headless eCommerce. But like you're saying, you don't want to have a headless solution that literally has—just think about a car. You don't want to buy an expensive vehicle and it literally has no chairs and no air conditioning. It's just an engine and a chassis and a steering wheel.   
 
RON: We have holes in the dash [for upgrades]. 
 
CHRIS: Decoupled essentially includes a UI, and it includes examples of UI, but it is decoupled in the sense that you don't have to use that UI. You don't have to use that interior and overall shell of the car, you can replace it easily. And it was designed to be replaced.  

That's really what decoupled is. You're getting the best of both worlds, and that's really where the space is headed consistently. So if you are looking at a headless eCommerce auction platform and you find that they don't actually have examples and an opinion, a great starting place for your industry, you might want to consider other options.  
Certainly, there are a lot of options out there in eAuction software. We're one of the most flexible. We strongly believe in decoupled as opposed to just headless. And, I think, Ron, this is probably self-explanatory, but [do you have] any other thoughts to share on that as well? 
 

what is hipaa

RON: [You should ask] how much do you want to spend, and how long do you want to take to get to market? It's one thing to come in and have to start from scratch. Or it's another thing to come in and say, “Hey, we already have a lot of this prebuilt. You're certainly welcome to use these elements,” and you could even mix and match. And that's part of what I think is great, right?  

Let's say somebody wanted to set up a kiosk, so when somebody comes in, they could log in and bid because they don't have those auctioneers in the room that are yelling, and accepting all the bids. So they want to be able to walk in, walk up to a kiosk, see the active auctions website, and then bid on their auctions from anywhere. Well, they could do that. Well, maybe you don't want to go pay. And I'm making up a number here, but let's say it's $25,000 to build that kiosk interface.  

Well, with Clarity, let’s say we already have that interface. You may want to build the website auction interface from scratch and embed all that in your existing website. But the kiosk interface, you want to go ahead and use what we've already built—as Chris calls it, our opinion—we have an opinion on what that should look like. You're welcome to use that software. So for maybe some channels, you can very quickly get up and running on the multiple mediums that Chris talked about. Maybe some of it you do use the off-the-shelf decoupled templates and UIs that are built. And then others you want to completely control and customize the UI and the user experience. And so those might be built from scratch 

That's why, with the last bullet here, I really wanted to make a point that it may be possible to use an existing mobile responsive UI for the tablets, the kiosks, the mobile, so you don't have to build that from scratch, even though you might want to fully embed, customize, and build from scratch the web experience, right? The desktop experience.  

Continue to Part 3 to learn about why headless and decoupled are so efficient.

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