If you’ve been following the ecommerce space for the last few years, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve heard of headless commerce (if you haven’t, check out one of our posts on the subject). By taking a headless approach to an ecommerce solution, merchants have nearly unlimited ways that they can allow their customers to buy. Want to sell on a website? No problem. Thinking of selling through a custom mobile app? Sure thing. Interested in selling your products through a partner channel while fulfilling those orders on your ecommerce platform? Absolutely. All these ways for a customer to buy can be facilitated using headless ecommerce and, at this moment, perhaps no other platform is getting as much attention for headless as commercetools .
While we’ve successfully built several headless solutions over the years using Magento and BigCommerce, we’ve almost always encountered some sort of limitation in the APIs of those respective platforms that has either prevented us from implementing a key feature or required us to come up with creative workarounds. Why did this happen? Both BigCommerce and Magento were designed well before the idea of headless. Sure, each offering has built out very robust APIs to support headless use cases, but neither were built from the ground up with this approach in mind. As a result, these APIs don’t provide complete coverage of store functionality.
commercetools, on the other hand, started with an API-first approach. What does this mean? Nearly anything you’d want to do with a commercetools store can be done via the API – managing customers, placing orders, creating/updating products, etc. This allows developers to stitch together any number of API calls to implement specific use cases, regardless of the front-end technologies being used.
Our ecommerce solutions team at ArgonDigital is currently performing a deep dive analysis on the commercetools platform. We’re doing this so that we can be better equipped to understand the benefits and limitations of the platform relative to something like Magento or BigCommerce. During this analysis, we’ll be publishing posts on our findings and will link them in this post.
Once we’re done evaluating commercetools, we’ll end up running through the same process for other platforms. If you’d like to see us evaluate a particular platform where we’ll publish our results on our blog, let us know using the very quick survey below.
And, as always, if you have any questions at all about headless solutions or general ecommerce solution, feel free to contact our team. We’d love to chat.
