Recap: Interactive Headless Commerce Happy Hour — Bolt, Moovweb, BORN Group, and Shoe Carnival

We recently hosted an interactive happy hour with <a href="https://www.shoecarnival.com/">Shoe Carnival</a>, <a href="https://www.borngroup.com/">Moovweb</a>, and <a href="https://www.borngroup.com/">BORN Group</a>&nbsp;for an informative conversation about <a href="https://www.bolt.com/blog/headless-checkout">building headless commerce systems that scales</a>, with real-life anecdotes from our panel of experts.Our first speaker was Myles Shipman, VP of Sales &amp; Client Services at BORN Group. BORN Group is a global ecommerce agency focusing on UX design and ecommerce implementations, so we started off learning some Headless 101 from the experts who help implement the entire process. In his session, Myles speaks to different e-commerce platform strategies and the benefits to going headless. “56% of enterprises organizations have started headless solutions or are budgeting for one next year… it is no longer a temporary trend.” He digs into the structure and systems at play in a headless platform approach, and talks through the different pieces of the puzzle.<img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672257362/Screen_Shot_2020_10_28_at_9_29_50_AM_5989ec771a.jpg" alt="Screen-Shot-2020-10-28-at-9.29.50-AM.jpg" srcset="https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672257362/thumbnail_Screen_Shot_2020_10_28_at_9_29_50_AM_5989ec771a.jpg 245w,https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672257362/small_Screen_Shot_2020_10_28_at_9_29_50_AM_5989ec771a.jpg 500w,https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672257362/medium_Screen_Shot_2020_10_28_at_9_29_50_AM_5989ec771a.jpg 750w,https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672257362/large_Screen_Shot_2020_10_28_at_9_29_50_AM_5989ec771a.jpg 1000w," sizes="100vw">Benefits of not using one monolithic system include speed, flexibility and adaptability, and personalization and customization, to name a few.We also heard from Ajay Kapur, Co-Founder and CEO of Moovweb. Moovweb is an all-in-one platform to develop, deploy, preview, experiment on, monitor, and run your frontend. They aim to make the web instant and simple. Ajay starts off with the challenges of going headless, noting that customers are “tired of being limited by the ecommerce platforms and the rate at which they innovate. It’s time to use these open frameworks.” He explains that by going headless, you are able to choose partners like Moovweb to increase site speeds and therefore increase conversions throughout the funnel. They found that sites that move to Moovweb XDN “are able to see 50% or more products per session.” Google has announced that in 2021, they are going to change their algorithm such that your brand will rank higher with a faster site; as traditional ecommerce platforms struggle with speed, it’s becoming increasingly important to have a tech stack that allows you the freedom to work with different apps and partners who can help remove this friction on ecommerce sites.Next up we heard from our own Loren Kelley, Enterprise Sales at Bolt. “Checkout is the central nervous system of a website,” so Bolt takes all of the complexity of checkout and wraps that up into a single platform. Through hundreds of AB tests and millions of checkout instances across our merchant network, we are able to pinpoint struggle areas, create a fix, and deploy that for all retailers on Bolt. We have a flexible checkout architecture, allowing merchants to rip and replace different pieces of the backend without negatively impacting the checkout experience. So, by working with a headless approach to a website, as Moovweb mentions above, there is freedom and flexibility to choose partners who can focus on specific areas, like site speed or checkout. Just as importantly, we are able to focus on the customer experience, rather than just the infrastructure.And who better to speak to customer experience than a retailer themself? We spoke with Tyler Drone, Senior Manager of Digital Development at Shoe Carnival, and heard about why he decided to go headless. “Speed was the most important piece; most importantly mobile speed. We were underperforming in that area, and headless was the way to fix that.” By going headless, Tyler’s team was then able to offload some of the development to freelancers or partners. “Being able to leverage newer technologies, we can access more advanced user web experiences more easily from a developer perspective.” By spending less time on development resources from their own team, they were then able to focus on functionality and customer and business needs.<img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672257374/Screen_Shot_2020_10_29_at_12_19_25_PM_d68c912164.jpg" alt="Screen-Shot-2020-10-29-at-12.19.25-PM.jpg" srcset="https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672257374/thumbnail_Screen_Shot_2020_10_29_at_12_19_25_PM_d68c912164.jpg 245w,https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672257374/small_Screen_Shot_2020_10_29_at_12_19_25_PM_d68c912164.jpg 500w,https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672257374/medium_Screen_Shot_2020_10_29_at_12_19_25_PM_d68c912164.jpg 750w,https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672257374/large_Screen_Shot_2020_10_29_at_12_19_25_PM_d68c912164.jpg 1000w," sizes="100vw"><img src="https://boltfinancial.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Screen-Shot-2020-10-29-at-12.19.25-PM.jpg" alt="">When asked if there are any specifics to consider around checkout, Tyler mentioned “Simple and secure” and noting that the customer experience is the most important. As Bolt knows all too well, it’s that customer experience at checkout is the most important final step to the purchasing process, and we work to make that as quick and easy as possible.If you’d like to hear the presentations in full, you can find a <a href="https://www.bolt.com/lp-wistia-video-play-moovweb-born-bolt-interactive-happy-hour-s3cwx5f1el/">recording of the event here</a>.