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Ron Halversen, vice-president of sales and marketing at Clarity Ventures, discusses the advantages companies can get from headless eCommerce.

RON HALVERSEN: Hi, Ron from Clarity. Today, we're going to be talking about headless eCommerce solutions, the pros, cons, and costs, as well as de-coupled eCommerce. So what is headless eCommerce? Headless eCommerce is an eCommerce solution that was designed to fully work without a front end UI display layer, like making a car without the body or interior, basically a fully functioning rolling chassis that could go down the assembly line and have any combination of body and interior installed. Sounds strange, but flexible.

Why would we do that, and what does headless commerce mean, anyway? Well with a robust backend architecture, and a robust API on top, a marketing team and developer can completely customize what and where they want to market and sell their wares while managing everything from a single backend application. Products can be pushed to an affiliate site like eBay, Amazon, B2B mobile apps, tablet, desktop, Facebook, marketplace, ads, landing pages, and much more.

what is hipaa

Why do we need headless eCommerce? Well, many eCommerce solutions are really off the shelf products that are designed by a company to sell to all their customers. Those customers are then fairly limited in what they can and can't customize. Most of those companies also don't have a robust API, specifically designed for headless functionality. So it doesn't allow the marketing team to proactively make changes based on feedback, selling trends, promotions, basically limiting their ability to move as quickly as the market moves. The best they typically have is some promotional ad space on the homepage of their site. So how are headless eCommerce solutions done?

what is hipaa

Headless eCommerce architecture starts with an architecture that enables the entire application to run without any front end UI. Then with a robust API, the developers must expose endpoints that the front-end developers can use to expose that functionality in whatever UI they're designing. The problem is that most solutions aren't designed with a headless solution in mind from the start.

For example, WooCommerce has been around forever with millions of installations, but since it was built as an eCommerce plugin first, their eCommerce API only exposes roughly a few hundred endpoints and doesn't support all the functionality exposed by third-party WooCommerce plugins that you might install.

what is hipaa

An endpoint is a function that can be called from outside of the application, such as creating and pushing an order into a solution. In comparison, our own eCommerce platform API exposes over 11,000 endpoints. It was literally built API—or headless—first. This means that there's never a feature built that can't be accessed through the API.

So how much does a headless commerce solution cost? Can it affect cost? Absolutely. Let's take our car example from before. Let's say that you bought a chassis with an engine, transmission and brakes, and it could run completely with any type of car, truck, or van body on it. That might be efficient if you are a factory, which also builds the bodies and interiors, but how much time and money would it cost to design, paint, and install the interior and exterior of a vehicle to make it usable yourself? The same can be true for building out all the UI elements for a headless eCommerce implementation.

what is hipaa

So is there a better solution? We think so. A hybrid headless solution like Clarity eCommerce so what is a hybrid headless solution? Well, it's a headless eCommerce solution where the developers build out standalone UI elements for the individual pieces for all the eCommerce functionality, similar to using Google maps on a contact us page. Ever been to a website, clicked on directions and used Google maps? Well, the piece of that Google UI is built to be embedded into any website or application while running the mapping functionality from Google, just like embedding a YouTube video on Facebook.

what is hipaa

That model is called de-coupled where the displaying of an is de-coupled from the application that runs the feature, allowing that feature to be displayed in many different places and styles on a website or app, whether it's a mobile app, marketplace site, or B2B auction sites. So what eCommerce UI elements can be loaded? Well, depending on the solution, pretty much anything, from thumbnails and product Zoom, link promotions, add to cart favorites, wish lists, et cetera, featured products or categories, top sellers, product tiles, and full features like a checkout cart, order history, user dashboard, allowing users to pay their invoices online.

what is hipaa

With Clarity eCommerce, basically everything that's in a B2C or B2B auction storefront can be embedded your existing website, no matter the CMS platform. And the best part is that you can have an out-of-the-box storefront set up and selling products while you design and build out your custom UIs that will attach via the headless architecture.

So in summary, a headless eCommerce architecture, if properly done, will expose all the function reality to marketers and developers so that they can customize and create any UI to capitalize on trends, promotions, target audiences, personalization, and more. De-coupled eCommerce platforms or B2B auctions will have been developed as a headless application first, then UI elements are created so marketers and developers can still do anything they want without having been months designing, building the UI from scratch. De-coupled eCommerce solutions can also go to market faster since it has a UI, but still provide all the benefits of headless commerce and access of a headless platform. So that's a quick introduction into headless and de-coupled eCommerce. Thanks for watching.

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Is Headless Right For You?

Headless eCommerce—or hybrid headless—can be the perfect solution to many problems that eCommerce businesses face. If what you've heard sounds like it might be right for your company, we'd love to give you a demo.

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