Return on Investment (ROI) of Headless Commerce
The benefits and competitive advantages of headless commerce are many. When done right, of course. Let’s look at some of the primary advantages that a proper headless commerce buildout can provide.
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As more and more people shop off your website and through other channels like smartphones, tablets, social media, etc., the classic eCommerce platforms, the monolithic one-size-fits-all eCommerce systems, are not well enough adapted to current trends.
With a headless commerce strategy, you get to control the front end of your online store. This, in turn, allows you to design and build tailor-made eCommerce front ends with a distinct brand experience that is quick and responsive for every channel. To innovate faster and maximize the site speed and performance, resulting in increased conversion.
Headless commerce allows for the decoupling of the frontend and backend of your webshop. You can pretty much use the frontend technology of your choice, tune the performance, and create a fast, modern webshop with a unique brand and customer experience.
Omnichannel commerce is another great benefit that comes out of the headless approach to eCommerce. Since the backend service is channel agnostic, you are ready to utilize any new channel that pops up. You can manage eCommerce channels independently of the backend service, meaning you can experiment and innovate faster. You are in full control of the channel experience.
Let's start with this one. Customer experience is the foundation of most of the benefits we will dive into here. Basically, improved customer experience can result in impactful benefits like:
- Increased conversion
- Reduced bounce rate
- Session length
- Increased pages per session
- More returning customers
But how do we achieve a better customer experience with headless commerce?
- The frontend is tailor-made: you can use data and insight to improve continuously without the constraints of templates or pre-sets
- Faster frontend load time increases the overall performance and Page Speed scores
First off, there are several ways to measure how fast a website (or App) is. If we look back to the good old definitions from Nielsen Norman Group back in 1993, they found that in order for a system to feel instantaneous, you have only 0.1 seconds or 100 milliseconds.
Computer software and Internet technology have moved far since 1993, but humans have not. So, the statement is still true. In terms of customer experience, you want an eCommerce experience to feel instant for optimal customer experience. Again, 100 milliseconds is what you have to work with there.
Increased conversion is the number that puts a monetary value on several of the benefits mentioned here. It is a very concrete number, and there are several sources that basically say that if you reduce your page loading time by 1 second, you increase your conversion rate by somewhere between 1-3%.
Faster is simply better for customer experience and then, in turn, online sales. Zalando saw an increase of as much as 0.7% with as little as a 100ms reduction in load time. Akamai, Amazon, and others have released similar findings.
Of course, most of these numbers come from companies with significant traffic and online sales, so they are not necessarily directly transferable to your online shop. But the trend is still true. Fast webshop leads to increased conversion.
To make it easy to see the potential return on investment for improving your online presence, we have built a free Page Speed ROI calculator where you can input your current data and compare it with a Superfast shopping experience.
You can simply enter your website URL, and we will automatically fetch your site speed scores. You then input your sessions, conversion rate, and average basket value then the tool will calculate the potential increase in revenue by making your webshop faster.
Today, the web uses something in the neighborhood of 3.7% of all greenhouse emissions. This goes back to energy consumption in roughly these three areas:
- Computing power on servers
- Data transfer
- Mobile devices and gadgets (including Macs/PCs)
You can directly impact all three of these areas by using less energy. Simply put, you can spend fewer server resources, transfer fewer data and make the rendering of your webshop faster on any device.
Our ROI Calculator shows how much trimming as little as 500KB helps in lowering CO2 emissions, depending on your website size and traffic Of course.
A fast page speed greatly impacts how high up in the Google search results you find your pages. A better score leads to better placement in the search results. The mobile page speed is the one you should be paying the most attention to, as this is the main factor for Google these days.
You should make sure your webshop scores are in the green, which means a 90+ score in Page Speed.
If you are using Google Ads for your marketing, you should know that the site speed affects the pricing. Basically, you get a penalty if your site is slow and a reduction in cost if your site is faster than average.
You can read more about how site speed affects Google Ads pricing.
Save the technical reasons of where you can bring your own frontend technology, well-implemented headless commerce gives you many benefits and is an investment that pays off. You increase your SEO visibility, pay less for Google Ads and directly increase the conversion of your webshop.
In summary, you get more people visiting your site, and they buy more.
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