How to solve your top e-commerce challenges with a headless CMS

By 2040, it’s estimated that 95 percent of all purchases will be made online. And as we continue to venture through the pandemic, global e-commerce numbers are showing that we could get there even sooner, with sales expected to grow to $6.4 trillion by 2024.

As more and more businesses try to take advantage of the rapidly expanding market, they are facing new challenges in trying to create the best digital experiences to match the ever-changing expectations of consumers.

“When we look at brands trying to engage now with their audience, it’s no longer just about the web. It’s about social and mobile and all these ways to engage that need to be personalized,” said Eric Courville, senior director of business development at Cloudinary, a provider of image and video management solutions. “Trying to do that having this single vendor locked-in approach where you’re forced to use a specific set of tools, the monolithic approach, it doesn’t cut it anymore, which is why we’re seeing a huge trend towards a composable architecture where the pieces are like Lego blocks and you can pick and choose your best solution.”

Courville joins representatives from Contentstack, BigCommerce and Algolia for a webinar series, “The ABCs of Composable Commerce,” where the four partners will demonstrate how easy and creative composable commerce can be, at an enterprise scale.

Nick Barron, Senior Director of Partner Enablement at Contentstack, says that using a headless content management system like Contentstack is the best way to build a solid composable ecosystem.

“We try to simplify things, right? You’ve got business folks, you’ve got tech folks. So we try to provide an interface where anyone can come in and leverage the capabilities of the whole system,” Barron said, adding that being able to do all of that within one platform offers you the speed to go live right away without having to master each level of development.

“When we're looking at this composable architecture and a set of APIs where we're just connecting to each other's endpoints, I don't have to be an expert in big commerce to implement my part of the solution.”

How can a headless CMS and composable architecture help to tackle the e-commerce challenges you’re facing?

Four Biggest Hurdles in E-commerce

Here are the four biggest challenges businesses face in delivering seamless customer experiences and how a headless CMS can help you address them:

1. Competition

Your competition is increasing every day, so delivering seamless omnichannel experiences and continually improving is paramount.

With a composable platform, you can choose the tools you need to create outstanding personalized customer experiences, monitor performance and easily scale and adjust to stay ahead of the competition.

2. The Customer Experience

Once you’ve begun to build a solid customer base, the next challenge is keeping them.

Research has shown that it can cost five times more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one and the success rate of selling to a current customer is 60 to 70 percent compared to only 5 to 20 percent for a new customer.

With a headless CMS, you can create stellar omnichannel experiences that are scalable and easily updated to make sure you can continually improve the customer experience.

3. Making and Increasing Sales

Converting a browser to a purchaser is the biggest and most important puzzle to solve in the world of e-commerce.

User research will help you determine what might be preventing conversions. Is your customer experience lacking in personalization? Are there technical issues? Once you have a sense of where to invest your energy, a composable architecture will allow you to quickly adapt by choosing APIs that suit your needs, taking full ownership of your customer experience.

4. Cybersecurity

Just because you sell online doesn’t mean theft is less of an issue. Having your data hacked and stolen can result in damage to your brand and image.

A headless CMS uses microservices, which are a tiny target for attackers, and since they’re not connected, it’s more difficult to quickly affect your entire system. Cloud-nativity is another layer of protection since your technology is hosted by outside vendors whose job is to protect your data.

Conquering Your E-Commerce Challenges is Easier Than You Think

If you haven’t made the move toward composable commerce and a headless CMS to build a stronger digital experience, there is no need to wait. Unlike a traditional CMS that requires a large up-front investment and ROI doesn’t begin to trickle in for months, you can be up and running in days, hours or minutes with a headless CMS. And because of the platform’s scalability, you can start small and add as you see fit.

“So many companies, they re-platform their tech stack about every five years because of issues both business-wise and maybe architecture-wise or there's compatibility issues or maybe the system is out of date,” said Maribel Mullins, tech partner manager at Cloudinary. “Imagine a world where you don't need to re-platform, or say you hate a technology and you want to swap it out or plug in a new business process as your company grows. Instead of buying a monolith turnkey product, you can buy best-of-breed components that meet each of your business needs.”

Watch “The ABCs of Composable Commerce” webinar series to see industry partners leverage the latest MACH-powered technologies to dream up, build and launch a revenue-driving shop in half the time it would take with a monolithic CMS.

Episode one and two aired in April and can be seen here.

Register now for episode three at 8 a.m. PST / 11 a.m. EST on Wednesday.