Revolutionizing Retail with Headless Commerce

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<p>Every ecommerce business, regardless of industry, has a common goal: sell more products. And increasing conversion rates is a big part of that strategy. <a href="https://www.bolt.com/blog/headless-checkout">Headless commerce liberates your consumer touch points</a> from the friction that frustrates shoppers—and you reap the benefits of more completed purchases.</p><h2>First, What Is Headless Commerce?</h2><p>Ecommerce websites consist of a front end and a back end. The front end is what your customers see and interact with: videos, search bars, “buy now” buttons, etc. In contrast, the back end is all the technical stuff like inventory and payment processing. The back end is crucial to powering the front end, but if set up less than optimally, it can bog down the customer experience.</p><h2>Why Merchants Should Care About Headless Commerce</h2><p>By separating the front and back ends of your ecommerce website, you can streamline the entire customer experience, including the purchase process. This, in turn, weakens one of the strongest foes merchants face: cart abandonment.</p><blockquote><p style="text-align:center;"><i>Nearly 70% of consumers who add items to their cart never go on to complete the purchase. That’s an astonishingly high cart abandonment rate and one estimated to cause $1 trillion in losses for ecommerce businesses each year in the U.S.</i></p><p style="text-align:center;">-BAYMARD INSTITUTE</p></blockquote><p>&nbsp;</p><p>By improving the checkout process with headless commerce, merchants remove many of the friction points that cause shoppers to abandon their carts. Ultimately, getting some of those lost purchases back can have a significant impact on profits.</p><h2>The Top 5 Benefits of Headless Commerce</h2><h3>Creates a speedier checkout process</h3><p>Speed plays a significant role in the quality of a person’s experience. Visitors expect pages to load in less than a second—and that expectation affects their behavior on your site. By detaching the more complicated features of your website from the side of your consumers' experience, you ensure each part of the checkout process loads faster. For shoppers that value speed and convenience, that can be the difference between abandoning a purchase and becoming a happy customer.</p><h3>Makes checkout more convenient</h3><p>To win someone over as a customer, you have to get them through that first checkout process. The right headless commerce solution will allow you to provide a checkout process that reduces the number of clicks and fields required, removing friction from the checkout experience. It also makes it easier to implement remote checkout, letting you embed the checkout process on social media feeds, media websites, and blogs. By being wherever your customers are shopping, you increase convenience, which leads to more sales opportunities and makes influencer marketing programs more lucrative and profitable.</p><h3>Prevents vendor lock-in</h3><p>With headless commerce, you don’t depend on one vendor for all your ecommerce functionality. Instead, you have the freedom to use what you need from various sources. In addition, you can mix and match the particular tools and features you prefer to create an ecommerce store that works just the way you want it to—both on the back end and the consumer side.</p><h3>Allows for more flexibility</h3><p>Headless commerce also creates more flexibility in how you run your ecommerce store. You can choose the best ecommerce tools for each need you have and aren’t stuck with the limitations of any one vendor. That gives you more power over the products you choose and the functionality you implement on your website. Plus, in the long term that also means more flexibility in the providers of specific features you decide to swap or implement.</p><h3>All of the above contributes to higher conversion rates</h3><p>Arguably the most crucial benefit of headless commerce is its influence on conversion rates. By making the checkout process faster and easier, headless commerce removes some of the common causes of cart abandonment. Of course, that means more sales for you. But even better, it means more new customers are likely to become repeat customers.&nbsp;</p><p>And since it also gives you the means to embed the checkout process for your products in more spaces around the web, you can increase how often people encounter the opportunity to buy your products. Offering more ways to buy—all of them extremely easy—adds up to more sales.</p><h2>I Want to Implement Headless Commerce—Now What?</h2><p>Deciding to pursue headless commerce is the easy part. But once the decision is made, you need to figure out how to implement it. Your business has two main options here: build or buy.</p><p><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1671746612/Screen_Shot_2022_04_13_at_4_45_28_PM_26d62f9179.png" alt="Screen-Shot-2022-04-13-at-4.45.28-PM.png" srcset="https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1671746612/thumbnail_Screen_Shot_2022_04_13_at_4_45_28_PM_26d62f9179.png 245w,https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1671746612/small_Screen_Shot_2022_04_13_at_4_45_28_PM_26d62f9179.png 500w,https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1671746612/medium_Screen_Shot_2022_04_13_at_4_45_28_PM_26d62f9179.png 750w,https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1671746612/large_Screen_Shot_2022_04_13_at_4_45_28_PM_26d62f9179.png 1000w," sizes="100vw"></p><p>Ultimately, building probably makes the most sense if you have a large team of developers and a list of specific features you want your headless commerce technology to include. For everyone else, though, buying is a smart choice—as long as you can find the right solution for your needs. We recommend looking for something that:</p><ul><li>Is easy to implement</li><li>Includes payment processes with the highest level of security</li><li>Prioritizes speed and convenience for customers</li><li>Works with other third-party solutions</li></ul><h2>Bolt Checkout OS: Take Advantage of All 5 Benefits of Headless Commerce</h2><p>Bolt CheckoutOS takes a headless approach to the checkout process while providing all the features you need to make the checkout experience easy for your customers. For businesses ready to take the plunge with headless commerce, choosing CheckoutOS brings a wealth of benefits:</p><ul><li>Quick ramp-up</li><li>Faster checkout times</li><li>Higher conversion rates</li><li>Top-level security</li><li>Compatibility with tons of other solutions</li></ul><p>Headless commerce makes your website work better for customers while making technical updates easier on the back end. And if you choose the right headless commerce technology, like <a href="https://www.bolt.com/">Bolt CheckoutOS</a>, you gain several additional features that improve the checkout experience for your customers and help increase conversions.</p>