Open Source Innovation with Headless BigCommerce

We’ve previously written about how hosts like JetRails can support Headless Commerce and recognize that solutions like BigCommerce’s Headless Commerce are making it possible for eCommerce stores to benefit from SaaS and open source applications working together. Check out our podcast episode dedicated to the topic. 

However, we’re frequently asked about real-world examples. As part of our #CommunityCollaborations series of articles, we polled some industry insiders to find some great examples of how Headless Commerce allows web developers to deliver outstanding results for eCommerce merchants. 

With no further ado, here are some of the coolest projects we found that used Headless architecture, including a variety of frontend solutions:

WordPress

At JetRails, we’re no strangers to WordPress. It’s the most popular CMS on the planet. At BigCommerce, WordPress happens to be a top choice for Headless Commerce projects. For insights, we turned to two leading BigCommerce agencies:

Rupert Cross of 5874 Commerce nominated Carluccios.com for this article. When we asked Rupert why Carluccios went headless and what made this project unique, he shared that:

“Carluccios have 75 restaurants & deli’s across the UK and that is the main focus of their business, including online reservations, but they also run a very busy online deli.

They were looking to update their website so that they could connect multiple services autonomously together to improve customer experience.

In order to build a site that was a content-led eCommerce platform with full CMS control, the only solution was to relaunch the website on WordPress with commerce powered by BigCommerce. Carluccio’s worked with Elite Partner agency 5874 in order to create a website that reflected their business model and connected their in-restaurant clientele with their online consumers through a rejuvenated website.”

Matthew Coles of Modelic nominated 2 websites, CNPUSA.com and TinnitusFormula.com, sharing the following background on these projects:

“Complete Natural Products has been on the BigCommerce platform but needed to upgrade to Stencil and at the same time create a site that better conveyed the quality of their products and the high level of customer service they offer.

The new site is rich in color and offers lots of information without feeling too heavy. In essence, the store unfolds to the customer using an innovative, horizontal mega menu.

Other notable features for this retailer-wholesaler combination site include the slick in-menu store locator and subscription management. 

Leveraging the power of WordPress, content management is wonderfully simple as the store owner can create and apply the different sections on the pages intuitively.”

“Arches Natural Products had a problem. They were done with Magento and its endless security woes, upgrades, and patches, but they certainly didn’t want to lose all the years of content they’d amassed in their WordPress installation. Sufferers of tinnitus turn to Arches for information and research, even if they don’t always buy the Arches landmark supplements. So when the headless option of a BigCommerce plug-in became refined enough for widespread use with their WordPress content, the Arches team was ready to make the move.

Arches tapped Modelic, who had serviced their Magento-WordPress eCommerce site for years, to come up with a new design and a coherent hybrid approach. The staff at Arches now have an easy-to-use admin, a way to fully harness the power of WordPress and a simpler process to change content on the site. Modelic was able to rebuild their Doctor ID system for ENT referrers, connect seamlessly to the fulfillment partners, and make the journey to conversion more straightforward than ever for their target market and loyal customers. “We couldn’t be more pleased with the way the site looks and functions, leveraging our years of relevant content,” founding partner Brent Curtis said.”

Meteorite

Haven’t heard of Meteorite yet? Neither had we! However, Jonathan Ybarra & Omar Habash of JOMA Tech were quick to fill us in, and even gave us a demo of the platform. They actually built Meteorite from scratch to act as a flexible frontend specifically for BigCommerce sites. Meteorite is very developer-centric. It’s intended to allow devs to place components into a theme and style with CSS, with the API calls already taken care of, and without certain limitations, you’d have in a native BigCommerce Stencil theme. Limitations, such as which fields are exposed to which page templates in Stencil.

The fact that an agency was able to develop a new frontend CMS to specifically work with data from the BigCommerce GraphQL APIs is a great example of how Headless Commerce is opening doors for innovation. 

Meteorite itself is a bit of a hybrid between SaaS and Open Source. The frontend sites that are launched for BigCommerce merchants are based on AngularJS and can be hosted wherever the store owner chooses. There are also central components to the Meteorite CMS that are hosted by JOMA Tech.

Jonathan & Omar were kind enough to share two examples of BigCommerce sites with Meteorite frontends, Fornida and WetSounds:

“Fornida sells servers and server components to other businesses and wanted to transform the way they do business. Before we built their new eCommerce store, they took orders over the phone and had to manually assemble quotes for customers.  This was very expensive and inefficient. They spent tens of thousands of dollars on cold calling software and sales reps. When they initially looked at BigCommerce, they didn’t think that it was the right platform for their needs because of the 600 SKUs per product limit.  They have over 4 thousand products. We developed a server configuration tool using our API + CMS (Meteorite), which was able to handle thousands of SKUs per product. Now they’re in the age of the internet and are able to service their customers more efficiently and provide them an easy way to place orders.”

“WetSounds, a marine audio company, was previously on NetSuite’s Suite Commerce Advanced and were sick of how clunky, feature-less, and expensive it was. They’d tried to update, re-design, and re-platform their SCA site 4 times before we came on and pitched BigCommerce. WetSounds wanted to be able to edit their site quickly and easily without any knowledge of programming, so we used our API + CMS (Meteorite) to build them decoupled front-end editing tools to control the look and feel of their store. Now they don’t have to pay an SCA dev $180/hr to change a paragraph or swap out a picture. Not only did we save them a ton of money, but also a ton of time. We were able to build their custom website on BigCommerce in 90 days using our headless commerce approach.”

Do you know of an awesome headless commerce site that combines open-source + SaaS technology? Reach out, and we may be able to include you in a future article!