Do Composable Commerce Solutions Come With a "Head" Like Shopify Does?

Composable Commerce leverages MACH as a part of it’s core commerce technology and thus means it will follow a Headless Commerce approach. This is great for businesses that are looking for a decoupled architecture to be able to grant them the freedom to customize without any dependencies.

However, while headless commerce offers a great deal of benefits, many people are often confused about how it will work. We always get asked, “Now that you’ve removed the “head” to make it headless, where do I find it? Does the head come with Composable Commerce? Do I have to build it?”

And the answer is, well yes it can come with a "head", and there are three main options you can choose from based on your specific requirements.

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The first option is with an embeddable cart and checkout. This is going to be for you if you have a content site or a blog that talks about your products and services, but you have not yet turned these channels into transactional streams. By integrating an embeddable cart like Snipcart or Elastic Path’s Shopkit, customers can shop and pay for items directly from your existing website without leaving the page. The best part is it requires little to no coding knowledge or experience, is available in seconds and is easily integrated with JAMstack principles.

The second option is with a Reference Store Experience. This is going to be for you if you’re looking for a compelling shopping experience right out-of-the-box . You can leverage a library of Omni-Channel Reference Experiences, spanning web, mobile, IoT, in-store, like chatbots, Alexa skill references, A/R and self checkout. These are great for businesses that want to get something up and running quickly but also want to easily change the look and feel of the store to match the brand identity and provide a seamless shopping experience across a variety of touchpoints.

The third option is with a third party Content Management System. This is going to be for if you have a substantial development team and your content is mostly managed by your marketing team who is committed to constantly updating pages and content. With this option your team will be building your custom frontend and leveraging best-of-breed solutions.

You can choose from a variety of Content Management vendors in the Composable Commerce Hub like Contentful, Acquia, Amplience or Bloomreach and customize your personal content experience across all channels. or If you have an existing structure, you can continue to use that to leverage a JAMstack approach for easy workflows and API calls.

With the Composable Commerce approach, you will never be locked into a specific vendor, you can innovate and customize at your freedom and always swap out one for the other to find the right fit for you.

In conclusion, there are many ways to get your head easily with Composable Commerce. Of course if you have a more extensive development team and want to design your frontend experience from scratch with JAMStack or any other code language, you are also welcomed to do that. If you have any more questions about integrating your frontend experience, I can always connect you with one of our internal experts, we’d be happy to help.