I am getting a few clients ask me about Headless Magento and in fact, I am getting quite a few people in my professional network just asking me generally what I think about Headless!
What I love about having been in technology for this long AND making sure I stay ahead of the game, is that it is actually quite interesting how you see concepts do full circle. Headless is by no means some new fangled tech thing, it has been around for as long as we started to get passed just ‘brochureware’ websites. How the nora batty do you think the banking sector managed to create online banking or do you think travel managed to be sold online. I worked for Natwest when they launched their online banking solution and I was at lastminute.com in their heyday when they were launching all sorts of online travel solutions. Do you think both the banking sector and the travel sector had the money to redevelop their core platforms that had been around for a couple of decades? No! What they did was to work out how they could use all the key functions they provided, but create a slick web front end that we could all use via our browsers. In essence, they made their core platforms headless.
Now, let me tell you, these projects were not fast to deliver and there were all sorts of technical issues to overcome as we tried to get the latest technology talk to very old technology and still deliver the demands of the end user! We were not agile and the pressure was on to deliver before a competitor found a way of doing something new and exciting before we could. The risk of losing customers because the competitor had a better and therefore more efficient way of doing things was high!
Now I come back to Magento. Imagine, just imagine if the banks and travel sectors had the money and time to rebuild their core platforms, wow, the online service they could have been giving us and so quickly, would have been amazing and the money they would have made… Well, when it comes to your online store, you need not have to imagine or be constrained by what lies beneath. With Magento, who have already completely rebuilt their platform so that is talks to all the latest technology and has all the latest and greatest eCommerce features, the world is your oyster. But with them now releasing a headless Magento, your online dreams can be whatever you want them to be.
Using Magento Headless means you can now separate your web front end from your eCommerce system, therefore providing a user experience with no boundaries. No longer are you bound to the usual Homepage, then onto a category page, then product page, basket and checkout, you can make the customers journey a true experience that is custom to how you do business. Now you can really start to convert clicks into customers and bring them into your world.
Just so I am not totally biased and you don’t see this as some crazy new thing from Magento, please do a search for headless eCommerce platforms and you will see there are many more springing up all over the place and this is because people know, this is the way it is going now.
