The Cons of Headless Commerce While diversity and flexibility are great, there are a few cons to consider with headless commerce as well: Complexity: With headless, you’ll be responsible for more infrastructure, so it will be more complex. This isn’t quite like it used to be in the pre-Shopify era when you needed a large team to build and maintain the website. But it is not as simple as setting things up on one platform. That means you’ll need strong partners or a larger in-house tech team. Cost: A headless site will cost more to build, manage, and maintain. You will have multiple platforms playing different roles for the store. This increases platform costs as well as the effort to build and manage it. Growing Pains: Since this is a new development in the ecommerce world, there will naturally be growing pains attached to jumping into this type of solution. Integrations: Integrations are required for platforms to play nicely together on a headless site. As more tech platforms adopt this concept, this will become less of an issue. But for now, you will be limited to the platforms that currently support headless sites.

When you separate your content repository “body” from its presentation layer “head,” it becomes a headless CMS. What truly makes a headless CMS better than a traditional CMS is its content-first approach with full APIs to access and display content in any way desired.

A pure headless CMS is different, because it offers no front-end capabilities at all, giving you full control of your customer experience via APIs. The CMS typically provides content managers with a presentation and channel agnostic way of managing content. It requires a front-end development team to manage the rest with the frameworks and tools they prefer: The content can be loaded by external applications which handle the content delivery to the client, meaning that the content can be (re-)used by multiple applications and channels (web, mobile app, audio guides, IOT).

There is some confusion around what makes a headless CMS truly “headless”, as vendors use the term somewhat loosely to label their decoupled or hybrid CMS systems. But a true headless CMS is one that was built from the ground up to be API-first, not a full monolith CMS with APIs attached afterwards.