10 Best Headless eCommerce Platforms In 2023 [UPDATED]

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.

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 experience assures seamless shopping across various platforms. Headless commerce boosts this by allowing flexible integration to deliver a consistent and smooth customer journey. It empowers businesses to adapt quickly to changing customer demands and offers a unified shopping experience.
• Rich Personalization: Most online shoppers like personalized experiences. With headless commerce, you can offer tailored content and recommendations, making it unique. It enhances customer engagement by adapting to preferences and behavior. This level of customization fosters loyalty and boosts conversion rates.
• Flexibility: Headless commerce provides front-end flexibility, allowing developers to use any technology stack. The separation of front-end and back-end allows modular development and lets teams work independently. This boosts efficiency and minimizes interfaces between the two.
• Agility and speed-to-market: Separating front-end and back-end allows parallel work that speeds up feature development and updates. It streamlines the workflow and accelerates time to market. Repurposing data across various channels future-proofs content, ideal for managing multiple websites with a single back-end in multi-brand businesses.
• Best-of-breed Integrations: Enterprise retailers benefit from headless commerce that offers a flexible data model across channels. A robust API allows easy retrieval and manipulation and fosters a coherent ecosystem with quick and flexible integrations for a personalized customer experience. Integration with technologies like chatbots and AI-powered voice assistants aligns seamlessly with the brand’s identity.
• Scalability and Performance: Headless commerce allows scalable systems by separating front-end adjustments from back-end functions to assure seamless expansion without interrupting core operations. This approach significantly enhances page load times, critical for businesses with content-heavy storefronts, and boosts overall performance.

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.

10 Best Headless eCommerce Platforms for 2023

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

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.

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

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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.

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.

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?

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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: A clean and uncluttered interface, without a steep learning curve, ensures that users can quickly and easily navigate the system. 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 robust and flexible headless 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.
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. 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.
4. API First Approach: When selecting a headless commerce platform, 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.
5. Omnichannel Capabilities: The headless commerce platform you choose must provide you with omnichannel capabilities. It 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.
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.
7. Business Needs and Requirements: When selecting a headless commerce platform, understanding your needs and requirements is essential. Identify specific features your business demands, such as mobile responsiveness, scalability, etc. Assure the platform aligns with your current and future needs to enhance overall functionality and adaptability.
8. Frontend Flexibility: Frontend flexibility assures easy user interface customization to match your brand. Look for a platform that allows seamless adjustments for tailored and engaging online shopping experiences.
9. Scalability and Performance: Scalability is an extremely crucial factor to consider when choosing a headless commerce platform. It should easily handle traffic and sales volumes as your business grows. Look for a headless platform that offers high performance by providing fast loading time and seamless navigation, especially for mobile shoppers, because they expect quick loading and smooth navigation.
10. Security and Compliance: When choosing a headless commerce platform, prioritize security and compliance. Assure the platform secures customer data and adheres to industry regulations. This is important for building trust, securing sensitive data, and avoiding legal issues.
11. Deployment and Hosting Options: Another essential factor to consider when choosing a headless commerce platform is deployment and hosting options. Assure it supports easy deployment across several environments such as cloud or on-premises. You should look for flexibility in hosting and allow scalability as your business grows.
12. Cost and Pricing Structure: Cost and pricing structure are crucial factors when looking for a headless commerce platform. You should consider the overall expenses, including setup, maintenance, and potential scaling fees. You must look for transparent pricing to avoid hidden costs. Ensure the pricing aligns with your business needs for a sustainable and cost-effective solution.
13. Proof of Concept (POC): A POC is a small-scale trial to test if the platform caters to specific business needs. It helps evaluate functionalities, scalability, and overall compatibility. This trial phase is essential to ensure the chosen platform aligns with the business and can smoothly integrate with existing systems.
14. Community and Ecosystem: A vibrant community means more support and shared knowledge. A robust ecosystem assures easy integration with other tools and services. Both factors contribute to the chosen headless commerce platform’s long-term viability and your ability to adapt and grow.

By carefully considering these factors, you can choose a headless commerce platform that aligns with your business needs.

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