On the Road to Composable – Going Headless

There's a movement happening in eCommerce. Something we at Product League call "the road to composable". As you run, build and scale your digital business, you might not even realise you're already on this road. You might think that every problem that comes up with each new eCommerce opportunity is yours alone. Rest assured, we're all on this road together.

This will be the second of three articles in which we explore the different stages of composable commerce. Today's topic: Going headless… (it's not as scary as it sounds)!

Read the previous article in our series: "On the Road to Composable – The Monolith"

The starting point, and a bit of terminology

How long does your content publishing process take? Multiple days? Has a design change, that seemed as simple as adjusting the button colour on your website, now taken multiple sprints? Are you waiting endlessly for your price change to show up in the search results? Then you're probably dealing with a poorly decoupled front-end. "What?", you might ask, "Is that contagious?" Not really, but let's first get our terminology straight: what's meant by front-end, back-end and the most mysterious word: "decoupling"?

The front-end takes care of the tailored user experience: the constantly changing brand messaging, colour palettes and user flows. This part changes most often in your eCommerce platform, so you can stay relevant to your customers and offer them unique content and experiences. This is where you want to try out new ideas quickly, test them for success with customers, and figure out how to best serve them. And this is where you're most hindered by connections to the back-end.

The back-end of your eCommerce engine handles the product catalogue, price and promotion management, order management, and so on. Think of it as the databases where information is stored and from where it's retrieved and modified when you need it.

The problem arises when the front-end and back-end are too tightly intertwined, or in software terms: tightly coupled. Think of a bowl of your favourite spaghetti, which was once a set of separate ingredients, but is now one thing: a bowl of spaghetti. Now try to isolate one ingredient. Pretty hard, right? Decoupling therefore means meaningfully separating the front-end from the back-end. But why would you want to do this?

Why headless?

A good way to look at your technology is through the lens of a pace-layered architecture. In the diagram below you see at which level systems need to change. Your back-end (database, product model, price model, etc.) doesn't need to change that often, but your front-end experiences do. They sit in different layers of the architecture. The front-end is therefore a system of innovation, while your back-end is a system of differentiation. Beneath that exists a third layer, your systems of record. Think of your ERP system, your PIM system, where you store your data for master data management.

In other words, the pace of change for different layers is different. That's why you want them to be independent of each other, so you have as few dependencies as possible for the changes you want to make. You don't want a stable system with a low pace of change slowing down your systems with a high pace of change, or your high-pace-of-change systems introducing instability into your stable systems! The goal of decoupling is therefore speed. As the amount of complexity and dependencies decreases, the time-to-market of new features increases. That time can then be used to deliver value to your customers faster, bring new features to market faster than your competitors, or even fix defects faster before they stop customers clicking the "buy now" button...

It's reassuring how often this problem occurs when scaling out of a monolith. Most successful retailers did well before eCommerce became a channel to think about. As we read in the previous article, by the time they started their eCommerce journey they'd already acquired a monolithic eCommerce system, because it solved their problems relatively quickly and easily with one system. Or they built their own custom system, but got overtaken by their own success. Either way, the pace at which changes to the customer experience were needed became too high, and the monolith couldn't scale with demand. This happened to Adidas and Nike, who outgrew their Demandware (Salesforce) platform. It even happened to Amazon, despite having built their own eCommerce engine, Cadabra, fully in-house. So what was their first step to scale out of their monolith? They freed the system in the most pain: the front-end.

The value

Is your monolithic eCommerce engine about to burst at the seams? And does the word "technical debt" come up in most conversations about your roadmap? Time to think about scaling at the point where you feel the most pain: the user experience.

Going headless isn't as hard as it sounds and has many benefits. By making the front-end part of your platform (the part most subject to change) independent, you start unlocking the potential of your teams: you'll see faster release cycles, time-to-market for new features will improve, and page load times will go up. All of this will directly benefit your customers and your revenue, delivering a fast payback period on the investments made. What this won't do yet is take care of the complicated back-end, with its layers of business rules, databases and (product) content.

To run your business at real scale, with the best performance and the flexibility to respond to customer demand, going headless won't be enough on its own, but it's the right first step. During your transition to headless, or even before it, you'll try out your first microservices. A dedicated on-site search engine, for example, or a modern content management system that's headless by nature. Real freedom! Now you're really heading towards composable, a landscape no longer limited by the question "what still fits within" the monolithic platforms, but instead shaped by the question "what fits me best?"

But we'll save that note for the third instalment in our series: On the Road to Composable: Composable Freedom. We hope you enjoyed this article and that it's eased some of your worries about cutting the head off your eCommerce platform. Until next time!

Product League helps you assess your current situation, your future, and the road to get there, using the power of our multidisciplinary teams, state-of-the-art technology and our extensive knowledge of the eCommerce world. Once you've set the vision, we can realise it together. We're an OutSystems powerhouse, strengthened by partnerships with commercetools and Contentful. Together with your business, we can achieve anything: from custom solutions to full SaaS implementations. We help you reach your customers and achieve your goals.