Are you being held back by the limitations of your e-commerce system?
Competition in retail is all about the quality of the digital experience, but commerce platforms alone can’t deliver the shopping experiences today’s customers demand. Add Crownpeak’s Hybrid Headless CMS to your e-commerce platform to unleash your sales potential with content-rich omnichannel shopping experiences that will drive more traffic, increase revenue and wow your customers at every stage.
Go beyond the shopping basket, and put your content center stage with the best headless CMS for e-commerce. Crownpeak makes it easy to optimize the customer journey with personalized interactions, shoppable videos, immersive imagery and emotive storytelling that will attract, inspire and convert.
Melanie Sisk, Director of Marketing Technology Programs for ASICS
Determining what is the best CMS for eCommerce can be challenging. There are so many different services out there that are competing for the opportunity to support your business in delivering compelling shopping experiences. Today, for any company looking for a modern, future-proof approach, the best CMS ecommerce platform architecture is what’s known as “headless”. A headless CMS divides the front-end of your shopping site from the transactional back-end, allowing you far more flexibility to optimize and enrich the customer experience, drive sales and grow your business. A composable headless architecture is fast becoming a critical requirement for organizations looking for the best ecommerce platform approach for large businesses.
The front end of your shopping site is what your customers and shoppers see every time they interact with your business. The back-end of your site - the checkout, inventory, and payments -handles the transactional services you provide to customers. The problem is that these two platforms are usually coupled together in the form of slow-moving and inflexible monolithic ecommerce platforms. These traditional ecommerce platforms were built to handle transactions, not content and have limited capabilities for delivering enriched, or multi-channel shopping experiences. They are also hard to customize, requiring several teams (from marketing to tech) to be involved in even small changes to aspects of your content.
There is a better way. Adding a headless CMS to your ecommerce platform enables you deliver content-rich, omnichannel shopping experiences with speed and simplicity. With headless content management, your CMS and your commerce platform are decoupled, allowing you to make changes to one, without ever having to worry about the other. Your marketing teams have the capability to instantly make changes to your site’s content, create new promotional initiatives, as well as improve your site’s performance easily and rapidly, without support from IT.
A list of the best headless ecommerce platforms available today would be incomplete without mentioning Crownpeak. Crownpeak’s Content Driven Commerce solution is designed to work alongside a company’s existing ecommerce platform to power content-rich, omnichannel shopping experiences that inspire and convert.
The main goal of an ecommerce CMS is to enable ecommerce shop owners to be able to make changes to their website’s content and UX without having to deal with code. Consequently, the best ecommerce CMS platforms are intuitive and simple, enabling business users to quickly and easily create and publish content and adapt the site to their specific needs.
One challenge with traditional monolithic commerce platforms is the lack of flexibility, which can restrict customers to utilizing a specific theme and offer little customization. Lack of customization in today’s era is a real problem for businesses looking to build eye-catching and completely unique designs.
In order for ecommerce shop owners to be able to stay ahead of the competition, they need the capability to both fully customize and rapidly update their shopping site. This is where headless CMS ecommerce may come into play. By adding a headless CMS for ecommerce to their underlying commerce platform, shop owners can completely customize the CX of their site, creating a new experience for their customers without having to change their existing commerce backend. Empowering marketing teams to drive the digital experience directly can also provide great resource efficiencies as it reduces the burden on IT to make website changes. With a headless CMS for ecommerce, everything from layout, images, and the copy can all be changed instantly by the marketing team. Agility can be dramatically improved, critical for launching time-sensitive promotions.
With an ecommerce headless CMS like Crownpeak, you are empowered to execute on your content-driven strategy. The system enables you to personalize the digital experience and schedule and distribute your content so that you can control exactly what audiences see which content and when. Another unique advantage of the Crownpeak CMS is it’s omnichannel capabilities. Content can be delivered headlessly to any channel and you can utilizes powerful preview tools to better understand how your content is going to look when it is delivered to your chosen channels. This gives you the ability to move with both speed and precision so that you always know exactly what your content is doing.
The best headless CMSs for ecommerce feature an easy-to-use API, that enable businesses to quickly and easily connect key business functions and add new capabilities to their marketing stacks. Headless CMS for ecommerce are designed for interoperability - you are free of the limitations of monolithic commerce platforms as you are not locked in to packaged suites of capabilities that may not move with your changing requirements. There are many headless ecommerce examples, but few of them provide as many features in their APIs as Crownpeak’s headless ecommerce CMS platform.
Another advantage of headless, API-first ecommerce CMS is the strength of their omnichannel capabilities. The best headless CMS for ecommerce empower businesses to gain competitive edge by delivering compelling and consistent shopping experiences across digital channels.
Ecommerce CMSs like Crownpeak make it simple to improve the customer journey with immersive content to help inspire and convert leads. Nowadays, in order to put your ecommerce business ahead of the competition, you have to deliver a uniquely satisfying and impressive customer experience. You also need to be everywhere at once, producing all kinds of content to keep your customers impressed and engaged all the time. Using an omnichannel CMS such as Crownpeak with a headless ecommerce API means that you can create content for any device and any channel, thus allowing you to create richer shopping experiences for your customers.
When conducting an ecommerce CMS comparison, business owners are typically looking for a few key features. Overall, they are trying to find the best CMS for ecommerce so that they can optimize the experience of their customers, drive more sales and future-proof their approach in a fast-changing market. As part of the vendor evaluation, they will also want to understand ecommerce CMS market share.
There are several leading ecommerce platforms examples that you could evaluate, but most of them fall short when it comes to agility and adaptability. This is why it is so important to understand the concept of a headless CMS when looking for an ecommerce CMS provider. Performing a headless ecommerce CMS comparison against traditional monolithic ecommerce CMS reveals a multitude of advantages to the headless approach. Having the ability to completely customize the front-end of your shopping site is crucial to creating a one-of-a-kind experience for your customers.
With an ecommerce CMS platform it should be faster and easier to move new products to market because the entire process of marketing has been streamlined. The best ecommerce CMS will also provide you with higher conversion rates and more revenue through the better customer experience it enables you to provide. Yet another feature of an enterprise-grade CMS platform for ecommerce is support for globalization and localization. Crownpeak helps shop owners ensure brand consistency across multiple regions, sites, and languages to support local marketing efforts and global business objectives.
Finally, the best ecommerce CMS platform will also be easily integrated with your existing e-commerce platform.
All of these characteristics should be considered when doing an ecommerce CMS comparison so that you can get a better understanding of what the best platform is for your business.
As you are comparing ecommerce CMS providers, you may come across some options that are described as ecommerce CMS open source. These are the kinds of companies that provide their open-source ecommerce code to developers on sites like open source e-commerce Github. One problem with open-source headless CMS ecommerce solutions is that more work is typically involved in terms of integrating, maintaining and using them with your existing ecommerce system than commercial solutions. Also, security and compliance issues can come up which can be more difficult to solve when working with an open-source ecommerce template. Headless ecommerce open source CMS platforms may also struggle with providing good customer support as there is frequently a lack of dedicated support when issues arise. For example, if a bug arises in the system, there may be no service team to provide support to businesses and your customers will be left unable to complete purchases on your site.
By contrast, one ecommerce solution that is not open source ecommerce is Crownpeak DXP. Crownpeak’s world class security and dedicated support, effectively address all of the issues that we’ve described here with open-source ecommerce CMS providers.
Headless CMS for ecommerce platforms provide unprecedented levels of speed, flexibility, and efficiency to your business. They also equip you with the tools you need to design a completely unique customer experience around your brand and tailor the customer journey so that you can get more leads converted and generate more profits.
