Headless eCommerce Advantages
Ultimately the WYSIWYG editors seemed like the best option to manage your content and website, right? But problems start when you need to mix your content with dynamic elements. It’s obviously possible but has limitations and can lead to big problems after you add customizations.
Now add to this problem the need to perfectly show your content and products on mobile devices. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. You need front end developers and they need full control over renderization methods and WYSIWYG editors are just a huge trouble to them.
Modern static page generators use separation of concerns while renderization is separate from content edition. This makes it much easier to implement predictable outcomes to your content creators and front end developers.
Here’s some insight into what headless and monolithic systems can mean for you.
Learn about Odoo and eCommerce
Headless vs Monolithic
Monolithic systems are built to serve each page on request. With a headless system you can generate all pages and statically serve them. On the monolithic system each page will be designed and content will be created specifically.
Using a headless system you will design the full website and then use the content and other data like your products and orders. It will show by pulling from other APIs, from one or several systems. This approach promotes the separation of concerns and while doing that your eCommerce will move faster than the competition’s.
Now consider using Odoo connected to Vuestorefront: You create your products inside the ERP and set prices and promotions. Vuestorefront will scale the eCommerce side getting orders directly to Odoo. Here you can now handle Warehouse, Shipping, Financial’s and CRM. Odoo can store your content but you can also use:
- Storyblok
- Contentful
- Contentstack
- Amplience
- LexasCMS
- Bloomreach
- Any other content provider that integrates with Vuestorefront.
Headless Advantages:
Easy decouple the front end team from the back end team
Front end team is free to edit, change and deploy content and dynamic elements without needing to reach out to the back end team.
Centralize and take ownership of your content
How many times have you migrated from one CMS or webshop system only to find that migrating the content is a project of its own? With a headless system, you can centralize your content and serve it through multiple channels.
Start Your Odoo Project NowDeveloper flexibility
Having multiple components allows your team to choose their own tools. You can interchange parts of your stack or entirely move the framework without lowering your site efficiency.
Hosting speed and latency
Headless systems are often based on next gen javascript frameworks that make the deployment much simpler. Vuestorefront allows you to do static generation. Also, placing the website on global distributed systems make it closer to the end customer and thus faster.
Security
Since the content is separated from the back end, the attack surface is reduced. Therefore, your team can simply focus on securing a limited amount of endpoints.
Why Not Just Integrate/sync with eCommerce Platform?
I know, you could be thinking, why not just integrate with Shopify or Squarespace? Since they are distributed eCommerce systems they can handle huge loads. But it’s not just an integration. Vuestorefront will use the data from Odoo. So, you don’t have the mess of having to deal with connectors that usually do a poor job trying to synchronize two complex systems. Also, integrating with a distributed eCommerce system will not allow decoupling data and content from front end.
Doing this with any other monolithic eCommerce backend like Magento, WooCommerce, OpenCart, Drupal, Typo3 … it’s even more difficult as you will additionally need to manage the respective server.
Is Headless the Best Option for My Business?
Setting up a headless eCommerce system might be a bit more complicated because it has several components. However, overall it’s not really a big difference. It all depends on how involved your company is with eCommerce.
For example, do you simply want a web presence and don’t need to change the UI so frequently to be on top of the game? Then set up Odoo with a simple “Odoo S.A.” theme (yeah, we don’t recommend just using any theme from the App store).
Now if you have big ambitions for your eCommerce, Vuestorefront Headless eCommerce and Odoo are the match made in heaven.
Start Your Odoo Project Now
