Headless Commerce Hosting

Headless Commerce is becoming more and more prevalent in the eCommerce world as merchants decide to marry highly functional eCommerce platforms with more flexible Content Management Systems (CMS) to create websites that are simultaneously dynamic and customizable. 

There are certainly a wide variety of use cases and benefits to Headless Commerce, which typically relies on APIs as the glue between systems. BigCommerce released a Headless Commerce solution to leverage the powerful BigCommerce platform with easy-to-manage CMS platforms like WordPress and Drupal for the frontend UI/UX. Magento has examples of some of their largest merchants undertaking a Headless Commerce strategy, which we can expect will only continue as Magento has been adding GraphQL functionality for faster and easier frontend API work in Magento 2.

Which brings us to the implications for hosting. The challenges of Headless Commerce include:

– A diversity of platforms that need to be supported by your hosting platform, from Magento for commerce functionality, to WordPress or Drupal.

– The need for hosting that’s built for the nuances of commerce sites, such as:

– Scalability: eCommerce websites are known to get bursts of traffic, especially around holiday sales like Black Friday, Valentine’s Day, and Flash Sales. All components of your website must be able to withstand extreme bursts of traffic.

– Security: With Headless commerce, you’re likely to have more than one platform that needs to be hosted. Often, these will be placed in their own hosting accounts, each properly optimized for the software being run. However, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Even your frontend CMS needs to be kept highly secure, or you risk hackers inserting their own checkout into your website experience.

– Reliability: Every facet of your eCommerce experience needs to be flawless. Whether it’s the CMS or the Commerce component, you’re going to want Proactive Monitoring, Alerts, and a team of experienced admins to make sure that your entire platform is consistently up and running.

– Speed: In eCommerce, time is money. Loading speeds impact bounce rates and conversion rates significantly, regardless of where content is being loaded from. 

– Support: When you need help with a revenue-producing web property, you want dedicated account management, fast response times, and a team that will go the extra mile to help meet your needs and goals for all of your hosted platforms.

– Tailoring: While Headless Commerce can bring a lot of simplicity to an eCommerce store, it can, by its very nature, require custom-tailoring. You’ll want a host that will work with you to assess your needs and optimize around your unique use-case.

Want to learn more about how the eCommerce community is coming together around Headless Commerce? Check out Episode #15 of The JetRails Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also watch the video of this episode:

We also recommend this helpful Headless Commerce guide written by the experts at JetRails, Bolt, and BigCommerce.

At JetRails, we’re committed to partnering with merchants to meet the challenges of Headless Commerce head-on. We’ve already created packages to support Headless Commerce hosting on Servers and Custers, as well as on AWS. Our commitment to customer-success lends itself extremely well to such unique hosting needs. For a free Headless Commerce hosting consult, please contact us at your convenience.