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10 Best Headless eCommerce Platforms In 2023 [UPDATED]

John Ahya
John Ahya

March 08, 2022

4 Mins Read

Last Updated May 16, 2023

10 Best Headless eCommerce Platforms In 2022

The eCommerce industry has reached its peak in the 21st century. People now access eCommerce through different mediums such as mobile apps, IoT, progressive web apps & more. As per Statista, eCommerce will account for 24% of all retail sales by 2026 globally, including both B2B and B2C.

The sudden rise in eCommerce is primarily because of the pandemic. Secondly, leading eCommerce giants like Amazon introduce new technologies for users.

Moreover, small to medium online store owners face fierce competition from eCommerce marketplaces. Adopting new technologies and trends is the only way to survive and move quickly. And how is this possible?

Simple! By adopting headless eCommerce. Various eCommerce vendors have already adopted the headless approach and are getting good results. If you own an eCommerce store, it’s time to go with headless commerce.

With many headless commerce solutions, it becomes difficult to choose the best. Therefore, we will provide you with a list of the best headless eCommerce platforms.

Before that, let’s get to the basics.

What is Headless eCommerce?

Headless eCommerce is an architectural approach in which the front end of an eCommerce platform is separated from the back end, which consists of the entire business logic. This approach gives freedom to the brand to develop anything as per their need.

In other words, Headless eCommerce means an “eCommerce that functions well without a head.” Here, the head is referred to as the front-end interface.

What is Headless eCommerce?

In this approach, the eCommerce store relies entirely on the backend and delivers the content using APIs and frameworks. The developers need to produce content like products, blog posts, reviews, prices, and more per the potential audience’s requirements.

Due to this, eCommerce store owners develop a highly adaptable online store and target users on different touchpoints. With a headless commerce solution, your store works efficiently on multiple devices.

Benefits of Headless eCommerce

Here are some of the key benefits of headless eCommerce platforms:

Omnichannel Experience

Omnichannel is a buzzword that is popular when it comes to online marketing. With the help of a headless commerce platform, you can build an omnichannel store for your users using a wide range of devices.

Most users will engage with your store before buying in the omnichannel method. The users will go through various stages of the buyer’s journey. For instance, users will view products on the website and compare them on mobile.

In short, headless commerce enables you to provide an omnichannel experience to users on various devices.

Seamless Integration

Headless eCommerce platforms mainly comprise APIs. Due to this, these platforms are quick to configure and integrate with third-party applications. APIs are responsible for flawless connection and transfer of data.

Headless platforms send messages in the form of code to the front end, which you can customize easily with popular CRM and CMS. Due to this, online store owners can regularly check and grow their online business.

To offer a seamless shopping experience to the users, you should switch your traditional store to a headless eCommerce store.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Headless eCommerce platforms are highly adjustable. They enable you to carry out continuous changes, customizations, and deployments without affecting the underlying technology it supports.

In short, the headless eCommerce platforms allow you to build a customer-centric store based on the needs of the end-users.

if you want to read more about the benefits of headless eCommerce, then you can read our guide about the key benefits of headless eCommerce.

Essential Factors To Consider When Selecting a Headless Commerce Platform

Let’s now check the essential factors you should consider when selecting a headless commerce platform to ensure that you make an informed decision that aligns with your business needs and goals.

1. Ease of Use

One of the most important factors to consider when selecting a headless commerce platform is ease of use.

A clean and uncluttered interface, without a steep learning curve, ensures that users can quickly and easily navigate the system.

A user-friendly interface will save time and reduce the risk of user error, which can be costly and time-consuming.

In addition, a platform that is easy to use will help improve user adoption rates and increase overall productivity.

When evaluating headless commerce platforms, it’s essential to prioritize usability and ensure that the platform meets the needs of your organization and users.

2. Customization Possibilities

A good headless platform should allow you to customize your website’s front and back ends independently.

However, it is crucial to determine how much you can personalize your headless platform. A robust and flexible platform should offer ample customization options to tailor your site to your business needs.

It is important to evaluate the platform’s customization capabilities, such as the ease of modifying themes, templates, and user interface.

With the right level of customization, you can create a unique and seamless shopping experience for your customers, ultimately leading to increased sales and customer loyalty.

3. Types of Integrations Supported

The headless platform must support integration with multiple platforms. It should be able to connect with your customer relationship management (CRM) and product information management (PIM) tools.

This ensures your business can efficiently manage customer data and product information through a unified system.

It is also important to assess whether the platform integrates with other third-party services you may require, such as payment gateways, shipping providers, and marketing automation tools.

You can streamline your operations and improve overall performance by selecting a headless commerce platform supporting relevant integrations.

4. API First Approach

When selecting a headless commerce platform, you must consider the API first approach. This means the platform should prioritize its application programming interface (API) and allow easy integration with other systems.

This approach ensures the platform can be easily connected to other applications, such as microservices and third-party software, resulting in a more flexible and scalable design.

In addition, an API-first approach allows for faster development and deployment, as developers can focus on building the application’s front end without worrying about the back end.

Therefore, choosing a headless commerce platform that prioritizes an API-first approach is essential to ensure seamless integration with other systems and a more efficient development process.

5. Omnichannel Capabilities

The headless commerce platform you choose must provide you with omnichannel capabilities. Today’s consumers expect seamless shopping experiences across multiple channels, including web, mobile, social media, and physical stores.

A headless commerce solution must provide the flexibility to integrate with various touchpoints and deliver consistent user experiences regardless of the channel.

This requires a platform supporting APIs and microservices architecture, enabling developers to build custom front-end interfaces quickly.

The platform must also have robust content management capabilities, allowing marketers to create and manage product information, promotions, and other content across channels.

By selecting a headless commerce platform with strong omnichannel capabilities, you can deliver a superior user experience and increase revenue.

6. Customer Support

It is crucial to choose a headless commerce platform that provides high-quality customer support.

A reliable and responsive support team can help address issues arising during the platform’s implementation, integration, or ongoing usage.

Look for a platform that offers various support channels, such as email, phone, or live chat, and has dedicated support personnel available to provide prompt assistance.

Additionally, it’s important to evaluate the platform’s self-help resources, including documentation, tutorials, and user communities.

By choosing a platform with robust customer support, you can ensure you have the necessary resources and assistance to optimize your headless commerce operations and maximize ROI.

10 Best Headless eCommerce Platforms for 2023

Here is a list of some of the most popular headless eCommerce platforms available in the industry.

Shopify Plus

1. Shopify Plus

Shopify is the leading eCommerce platform in the market. The platform powers a vast number of online stores across the globe.

Shopify Plus is an advanced version of Shopify. It is specially built to target enterprise businesses. It is also the top headless eCommerce platform in the industry that allows you to remove front-end design from the backend infrastructure. You can combine any framework with the backend to modify your eCommerce store and provide a better experience to the users.

Shopify Plus Headless Commerce
The USA accounts for 50% of the total Shopify merchants with over 875,000 Shopify merchants.
Source: Demand Sage

Are you planning to go with Shopify Headless eCommerce Platform? We can help you build an attractive Shopify Plus store.

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The platform allows you to transform your traditional store into a modern eCommerce store by providing many integrations, extensibility, and customizations. With Shopify Plus, you can turn every screen into a digital storefront and update content across all channels with CMS. It allows you to provide an omnichannel experience to users.

Some of the leading brands worldwide utilize Shopify Plus for their online store. If you also want to provide a seamless experience for your online store, you can opt for Shopify development.

Magento Commerce

2. Magento (Adobe Commerce)

Magento, now called Adobe Commerce, is an open-source eCommerce platform that allows businesses to reach new heights with the help of its technology.

Adobe Commerce enables you to deliver bespoke applications according to the customer’s requirements. As a result, the popular headless eCommerce platform allows you to experiment because the isolated system and operations don’t get disturbed. The decoupled architecture is responsible for new features and integrations.

The platform is flexible – allowing you to provide users with a fully customizable experience. It is compatible with a range of third-party integrations. Moreover, its unique features enable you to analyze customers and offer different experiences across different channels.

If you want to offer your audience a trending and customizable experience, you can get Magento development services from a company.

Bigcommerce

3. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is one of the most popular SaaS eCommerce platforms in the industry. Customization, top-notch performance, simplicity, and ease of use make it suitable for any business and size. The platform provides many tools, such as product listing, payment processing, and more.

The platform best suits established and growing businesses looking forward to reaching a broader audience and improving operations. In BigCommerce, the presentation feature gets separated from the commerce engine. The headless BigCommerce platform allows you to build and operate multiple front-end solutions from just one account.

BigCommerce is one of the best headless eCommerce platforms that enables you to deliver a quick API-driven experience through CMS, an application device, or a front-end. You can offer a personalized experience to the users with BigCommerce API.

Wondering Why To Choose BigCommerce?
Wondering Why To Choose BigCommerce?

Check out the reasons why businesses choose BigCommerce to build their online store.

Read More

Several leading worldwide brands, such as Sony, SkullCandy, America Leather, etc., use this eCommerce platform because there are many reasons to choose BigCommerce.

If you also want to provide users with a personalized experience and generate good revenue for your business, you can opt for BigCommerce development.

Commercetools

4. Commercetools

Commercetools is the top headless eCommerce platform built on the latest MACH principles (Microservice-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless). The platform provides point-of-scale functionality through cloud deployment.

The platform is written on PHP and MySQL. It enables separating the storefront via particular APIs and instantly makes up store experiences based on the target storefront.

Its groundbreaking API approach allows retailers to establish brand awareness by building engaging customer experiences around multiple channels now and in the future. Moreover, the platform looks after the stream of data exchange between the front-end client and the backend ERP system. Being a complete API-enabled platform, most of the functionalities are built-in APIs.

This headless platform offers your store a range of world-class functionalities and features to provide a personalized customer experience.

CommerceLayer

5. CommerceLayer

CommerceLayer is another well-known headless commerce platform allowing you to build modern eCommerce stores. With this headless commerce, you can create a website from scratch and integrate popular shopping features, such as distributed inventory, localized payment gateways, promotions, etc. Moreover, you can eCommerce into wearable and voice devices using the CommerceLayer.

With the help of its blazing-fast API, you can create a scalable eCommerce platform and provide a localized shopping experience to users worldwide.

Compared to various headless Commerce platforms, this allows you to add a subscription-based model to your store. It is especially suited for brands that want next-gen solutions.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

6. Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a popular multi-tenant, cloud-based headless commerce platform targeted at mid and enterprise-level store owners. Salesforce offers this agile eCommerce platform that seamlessly integrates with other products within the suite. It has a built-in API that decouples backend services from the frontend. It is agile and innovative.

Its cutting-edge API offers the highest adaptability and customized store creation to provide a seamless experience on different mobile, social, web, and store channels.

Ultimately, this headless commerce platform aims to drive conversations and enhance brand loyalty. The company understands your store’s requirements and provides prices per the needs.

Snipcart

7. Snipcart

SnipCart is one of the most flexible headless commerce solutions for developers and merchants. It is also the most effective solution for a shopping cart. It enables you to convert any website into an eye-catching eCommerce store using the APIs within a few minutes. The platform is built on HTML & JavaScript.

Here, eCommerce templates and the logic is kept at the front end. Therefore, it is suitable to integrate with static websites, web apps, and old-school traditional CMS. SnipCart allows you to scale your eCommerce store anytime using RESTful API, a JS API, & powerful webhooks.

SnipCart offers an extensive list of eCommerce store features like merchants & customer dashboards, payment gateway support, multi-currency support, shipping rates in real-time, automatic invoicing, and more.

Foxycart

8. Foxycart Enterprise

FoxyCart is a highly-customizable headless eCommerce platform allowing designers and developers to build a robust, easy-to-use shopping cart.

It is based on PHP and HTML, thus enabling merchants to sell all kinds of products anywhere with the help of seamless API integration. It provides flawless integration with third-party services like SquareSpace, ClickFunnerls, and more. It is especially suitable for designers or developers who integrate existing CMS with an eCommerce store.

FoxyCart allows designers and developers to create exceptional cart, store, and design that suits a particular business. Besides, it enables you to create a unique checkout page by accepting money from different payment gateways. The platform also allows store owners to provide discounts and coupons to customers.

OroCommerce

9. OroCommerce

OroCommerce is one of the most popular B2B headless eCommerce platforms. It is built for distributors, wholesalers, brands, and manufacturers. This open-source and scalable eCommerce solution is suitable for cloud and on-site setup.

OroCommerce headless eCommerce offers better flexibility and a high level of customization options. These include digitizing your online store, initiating online ordering, providing various payment options, etc.

It is written in PHP and Symphony, which enables building solid eCommerce stores using APIs that provide a seamless experience to users on various devices and customer touchpoints.

Elastic Path

10. Elastic Path

Elastic Path is a composable, API-first headless commerce solution targeted at enterprise-level organizations. It enables template-less eCommerce solutions to be added as middleware into the ERP systems. The ultimate purpose of this platform is to allow brands with complex requirements to offer unique digital commerce solutions.

It is written in Java and Apache. Developers can provide a super-efficient storefront using the APIs. It is the most scalable headless commerce platform that allows you to provide omnichannel shopping experiences to users.

Demand Sage
Need Help Choosing the Best Headless Commerce Platform?

With over a decade of experience in the eCommerce development industry, we can help you choose the best headless eCommerce platform.

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A Quick Summary of the 10 Best Headless Commerce Platforms

Here’s the quick summary of above-mentioned headless eCommerce solutions.

These platforms offer flexibility, scalability, and customization options to create a seamless shopping experience across multiple channels.

At the top of the list are BigCommerce, Magento, and Shopify Plus, which are well-established platforms with various features and integrations.

These platforms provide you with the tools you need to create a modern, agile, and customer-centric commerce experience.

Sr. No Platform Key Features Free Trial Price
1. Shopify Plus Flexible front-End, Highly scalable Yes Starts at $2,000/month
2. Magento (Adobe Commerce) Robust customization, advanced product management Yes Starts from $22,000/year
3. BigCommerce Robust APIs and integrations, Advanced security Yes Pricing upon request
4. Commercetools API-first approach, Cloud-Native and Microservices architecture Yes Pricing upon request
5. CommerceLayer Subscription commerce capabilities, API-first platform Yes (for 100 orders/month) Pricing upon request
6. Salesforce Commerce Cloud Unified commerce solution, AI-powered personalization No Pricing upon request
7. Snipcart Easy Integration, Customizable Shopping Cart No 2%/transactions+ Payment gateway fees
8. Foxycart Enterprise Highly customizable, Advanced security No $2000+/month
9. OroCommerce B2B-focused, Advanced workflow management Yes Pricing upon request
10. Elastic Path API-first platform, Microservices-based architecture Yes Start from $50,000/ year

Final Thoughts

The eCommerce industry will touch new heights in the future with emerging technologies. The craze of headless commerce platforms will remain as it allows you to provide a personalized shopping experience to the customers. Now, it’s your turn to choose one of the best headless eCommerce platforms mentioned in the list.

If you need help choosing a suitable headless platform for your store, feel free to contact us.

WebDesk Solution is a full-stack eCommerce development company. We have years of experience delivering eCommerce solutions from startups to enterprises across the globe. Hence, we can choose a reliable headless eCommerce platform and customize your store to your business needs.

Frequently Asked Questions About Headless Commerce Platforms

Some famous store examples that use headless commerce are Nike, Pure Formulas, Recess, Venus, and Lilly Pulitzer. The headless approach offered these brands the flexibility to easily optimize their stores.

Yes, headless CMS is suitable for all kinds of eCommerce stores. When your business grows well, and you sell many products, you incorporate many images and videos on your eCommerce site, which impacts the website speed. Here, headless CMS can help you by offering a fast shopping experience regardless of how extensive your content library is.

Yes, Shopify can be used as a headless eCommerce platform. Developers can use Shopify’s APIs and SDKs to build custom front-ends using their preferred programming languages and frameworks while still leveraging Shopify’s powerful commerce features, such as inventory management, order processing, and payment processing.

When choosing a headless eCommerce platform, it is important to look for key features such as robust APIs and SDKs, flexible content management capabilities, scalable infrastructure, strong security measures, good developer community and support, and integration with third-party tools and services.

A headless eCommerce platform differs from a traditional one in that it separates the front-end presentation layer from the back-end commerce functionality. In a traditional eCommerce platform, the front-end and back-end are tightly integrated, which can limit flexibility and customization options.

John Ahya
John Ahya

John is the President and Co-Founder of WebDesk Solution, LLC. Living the digital agency life for over 10 years, he explores an extensive eCommerce world. He has immense experience in all major e-commerce platforms. Being a nature lover, he likes to breathe the fresh air on the hill stations during vacations.

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