You can’t avoid every bump in the road to modernizing your e-commerce infrastructure. But you can anticipate the most common roadblocks, wrong turns and traffic jams.
E-commerce modernization usually means transitioning to a headless IT infrastructure. With headless, you decouple the frontend of your IT infrastructure — typically the presentation tier — from the backend, where most of the business logic resides. Headless lets you rapidly iterate your frontend to finetune your customer experience without having to coordinate everything with the backend, which would bog down development.
Avoiding these six pitfalls can make your journey to headless commerce go much more smoothly:
Strategic oversights. You can’t afford to scrimp on strategy in your headless commerce journey. That means starting with a discovery process and gap analysis that assesses your current IT state — systems, hardware, personnel, skills, partners and methodologies — and lays out a roadmap for moving toward a headless ecosystem that meets your current and future needs. The more planning you build into your strategic roadmap, the better your chances of success in the long haul.
Time-frame miscalculations. It’s easy to underestimate how much time is involved in a headless transformation. Every company has unique IT challenges and marketplace realities. You may have a small IT team that needs lots of help, or a large IT team that needs only highly specialized assistance. It takes a lot of fact-finding, research and meetings to figure everything out. That can take more time than you might expect.
Platform and software stack slipups. Missteps in choosing the right headless e-commerce platform or software stack for the head can cause headaches for years to come. Choose the platform that meets your current and future needs. Every software stack approach for building the head (presentation tier) has pros and cons. The best route is to draw up a list of requirements, assess your current IT skillsets and pick the software stack that gives you the most of what you need with the fewest compromises.
Skill misalignments. Conventional e-commerce platforms need abundant expertise in the backend, while developing the head on a headless commerce platform requires a separate set of frontend skills. Moreover, headless commerce requires a wealth of experience with cloud technologies and microservices. Your headless commerce journey must assess your skillsets across all the new technologies and plug any gaps you discover.
Methodology missteps. Headless commerce allows a rapid release and iteration cycle that requires continuous integration of skills from multiple disciplines beyond IT, such as UI design, digital marketing and product development. Agile and DevOps methodologies provide the framework for keeping everybody aligned during two- or three-week development cycles.
Botched buy-in. Everybody must pull together. Otherwise, all the benefits of headless commerce collapse. That’s why it’s essential to secure buy-in from everybody involved in the transition — not only the leadership but also the rank-and-file technical teams and support people.
Picking a Partner for Your Commerce Modernization
Headless commerce delivers immense value in the digital marketplace, but you have to pay a cost in complexity to enjoy that value. To make it all work, you need a partner with deep experience in online commerce and broad technical expertise across frontend, backend and cloud software platforms. These are the capabilities that DMI brings to your headless commerce transition. Our consultants know how to merge commerce domain knowledge, IT infrastructure, marketing and user experience design to give our clients a head start in their headless transition.
—Atul Bhammar, senior vice president, solutions architect, digital commerce
