Written for Slatwall

Why B2B Content Marketers Should be Excited About Headless eCommerce

In one word: freedom. Content marketers always need to keep up with trends by constantly revising and refreshing their content to reach the ideal audiences. But many times, traditional eCommerce platforms can limit your creativity with restrictive templates and formats. Worse yet, they can cause friction in the customer experience and make your site feel rough and disjointed.

What if there was a way to bypass the limitations and easily create content that best suits your business allowing full design control? That’s what headless eCommerce can do for you.

What is Headless eCommerce

Think of headless eCommerce like another famous headless being: the Headless Horseman from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” He could choose any object to be his head, so he chose a jack o’ lantern because it was scary: portraying the perfect image for his brand and to maximize the effect on his audience. Headless eCommerce follows the same idea. By separating the head and body of eCommerce, the content management system (CMS) and the eCommerce platform, you can fully customize either part without affecting the other offering more flexibility and freedom for the content marketing team.

Unlimited Freedom

There’s nothing more frustrating than having a brilliant marketing design idea but not being able to pull it off because of the limitations caused by your traditional eCommerce template. Headless eCommerce doesn’t rely on templates. By removing that restriction, it allows your content marketing team complete flexibility to bring their visions to life.

With unlimited creative freedom comes the ability to more effectively appeal to your audience base and improve SEO. Not only is headless eCommerce easier, but it can help attract clients to your business.

Save Time and Effort

One of the biggest complaints from content marketing teams is the time it takes to update traditional eCommerce pages. To make changes, you have to edit not only the eCommerce page, but the CMS as well. Plus, your vision of the webpage must adhere to the specific format of the eCommerce template that you’ve chosen, further limiting your creativity.

With a headless eCommerce platform, the sky’s the limit. The two systems aren’t tied to one another, so a cosmetic edit on the eCommerce side won’t affect anything for the CMS. Similarly, if you need to update your CMS, all updates will automatically be applied to the eCommerce page, or pages, without any work required.

Manage Different Channels

Many businesses like to use multiple sales channels to attract new customers. Using a traditional eCommerce platform, any updates you’d like to make to your products, would have to be made to each individual channel. For some businesses, updating every channel could take a team weeks to accomplish. With a headless eCommerce platform, any updates to the CMS will apply changes to every linked eCommerce channel. One update for all channels, whether there are two or a hundred.

It also means that updates won’t be overlooked. If you manage three websites for your business and decide to increase the price of a product, if you’re using a traditional eCommerce system, you need to find that product and update it on each site. If you forget one, you might end up losing money for that channel. Using a headless system, one update in the CMS and it’s applied to all linked channels, guaranteed. 

Create More Content

Since it requires less time and energy to make edits, your team is free to update content as frequently as they like. Competition is fierce for eCommerce businesses. One of the best strategies for attracting organic traffic is by consistently adding valuable and engaging content. By removing some of the roadblocks standing in the way of your content marketing team, they are free to add and change content freely, which will provide a better, more engaging experience for your clients.

A headless eCommerce system also allows content marketers to update information almost instantly. Running a sale on a product? Update the information in your CMS and it’s immediately applied to all linked eCommerce pages. Your team won’t have to take the time and hunt down all instances of the product on your website to update the pricing. This is how major online retailers like Amazon can run so many deals and keep their products updated so efficiently. Using a traditional eCommerce system, continuously keeping up with that many updates would be impossible.

Works with Any CMS

If you already have a CMS that works for your business, there’s no need to change to the one that comes bundled with the headless platform. One of the major benefits of the headless system is that both parts work independently. That means that any CMS, or even multiple content management systems, can work with a headless eCommerce system. There are no software limitations.

A headless eCommerce platform will also allow you to switch your CMS more easily than if you were using a traditional eCommerce platform. With traditional eCommerce, if you found a new platform that you’d like to use, you would have to start from scratch and set everything up brand new. By using a headless platform, all you have to do is relink the eCommerce platform with the new CMS. You’d only have to make updates on one piece of software instead of starting from scratch.

Headless eCommerce: Worth the Hype

With all the benefits that a headless eCommerce system brings to the table, there’s no reason that B2B content marketers shouldn’t be excited. By giving them complete creative control over their online image without the limitations of frustrating templates, they can create a cohesive user experience for their clients from discovery to checkout across all touchpoints.