Exploring the Future of E-commerce: Unveiling the Potential of Headless Commerce

In the ever-evolving landscape of e-commerce, businesses are constantly seeking innovative ways to enhance user experiences, streamline operations, and stay ahead of the competition. One such innovation that has been gaining significant traction is headless commerce. In this blog post, we'll delve into the concept of headless commerce, its benefits, challenges, and why it's poised to shape the future of online retail.

What is Headless Commerce?

Traditionally, e-commerce platforms are built on monolithic architectures where the front-end presentation layer (the website or app that users interact with) and the back-end commerce functionality (inventory management, payment processing, etc.) are tightly integrated. 

However, headless commerce decouples these layers, allowing businesses to use a front-end presentation layer that's separate from the back-end commerce functionality.

In essence, headless commerce provides flexibility by separating the customer-facing interface from the underlying e-commerce infrastructure. This separation enables businesses to deliver highly customized and seamless user experiences across various channels, including websites, mobile apps, voice assistants, smart devices, and more.

The Benefits of Headless Commerce:

• Flexibility and Scalability: With headless architecture, businesses can adapt and scale their e-commerce operations more easily. They can experiment with different front-end technologies, update designs without impacting backend processes, and quickly deploy new features to meet evolving customer needs.

• Enhanced User Experience: Headless commerce empowers businesses to create immersive and personalized user experiences. By leveraging modern front-end technologies and frameworks, such as React, Angular, or Vue.js, companies can design compelling interfaces tailored to their target audience, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.

• Multichannel Capabilities: In today's omnichannel world, consumers expect a seamless shopping experience across various touchpoints. Headless commerce enables businesses to deliver consistent branding and functionality across web, mobile, social media platforms, voice assistants, IoT devices, and more, thereby expanding their reach and maximizing sales opportunities.

• Faster Time-to-Market: Decoupling the front-end from the backend simplifies the development process and accelerates time-to-market for new features and updates. Development teams can work independently on each layer, iterating quickly and efficiently without disrupting other parts of the system.

• Future-Proofing: By embracing headless commerce, businesses future-proof their e-commerce infrastructure. They can adapt to emerging technologies and consumer preferences more readily, ensuring they remain competitive in a rapidly evolving market landscape.

• Complexity: Managing separate front-end and back-end systems introduces complexity, requiring robust integration and coordination between the two layers.

• Technical Expertise: Implementing and managing a headless commerce architecture may require specialized technical skills and resources, particularly in terms of API integration, performance optimization, and security.

• Cost Considerations: While headless commerce can offer long-term cost savings through increased efficiency and scalability, initial implementation costs and ongoing maintenance expenses should be carefully evaluated.

• Content Management: With decoupled architecture, content management becomes more challenging, as content must be delivered dynamically across various channels while maintaining consistency and coherence.

Challenges and Considerations:

While headless commerce offers numerous benefits, it's essential to acknowledge the challenges and considerations associated with this approach:

Embracing the Future of E-commerce:

In conclusion, headless commerce represents a paradigm shift in how businesses approach online retail. By decoupling the front-end presentation layer from the underlying commerce functionality, companies can unlock unprecedented flexibility, scalability, and creativity in delivering superior user experiences.

While the adoption of headless commerce may pose challenges, the potential benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. As consumers continue to demand seamless and personalized shopping experiences across an array of devices and channels, businesses that embrace headless commerce will be well-positioned to thrive in the digital marketplace of the future.

Evolution to Orderla Commerce

We have launched Orderla.my in the early of 2020, and fast forward we will launch the next evolution of Orderla.my as Quick Commerce platform to an E-commerce platform as Orderla Commerce.

So what is Orderla Commerce ?

When the Orderla.my was on going development, we was also wondering on if we could the normal e-commerce too. 

Orderla.my was perfect ( quite ok ) for quick ordering the thing that we already know, or familiar with like the food. Which is ok to have one image. But of Orderla Commerce (OC for short) we can add multiple images for a product. And we if we have variants, we can assign which image for that particular variant. 

OC also has more control on how do we make the variants. For example variants come with the type of variants. For example: color, weight, storage and more, we can generate the list of variants from that type and its options. Compare to Orderla.my only can create the variants in flat manners. We also go further for making a sensible identification for each variants by changing the variant's name into number. And the variant's id is the total of options. We also can rearrange the position of the options, and the variant's id still intact. 

The variant's ID is used when sharing the link, so that when people open the link will immediately which variant you are sharing. 

For a product with a variant we use ~ (tilde) to identify the item. In the future we will use : colon for modifier.

In OC we use a one-to-many relationship for an order to the order-items. Which can make it easier to query which items was sold (for example) for statistics or report purpose. 

And other thing is as merchant you will be able to make your own store front by connecting the OC by API. Or in another word, headless. We will soon providing the API so that you can create your own front end in the future. 

For now as it's different from Orderla.my, it's not a WhatApp first approach. Rather it is supposed to be a normal ecommerce. Customer need to checkout using proper payment gateway. For now we choose SecurePay for now. 

Nevertherless, we think it's still not perfect and requires more development but we think it's still beneficial for some too who don't need more complicated workflow. 

But as for now we think we have build something good enough to be launched and to be used. But just don't know how robust with unexpected customers. 

Besides of OC, we want to offer merchant to build their own OC, by having us to deploy separately from the main OC.

All in all, this is going to be a nerve wrecking experience to launch a new product after serveral time of hardness. And we are still in the hardness mode to perfecting the OC system near in the future.

If you read this far. Congratulation and sign-up for interest for Orderla.co at :

https://orderla.co/register-interest

 

The State of Orderla in 2024

Welcome to 2024. 

Let we discuss about the state of Orderla in 2024. 

It has been 4 years now since the debut in 2020. While the fundamental is the same, but the layout and the UI / colors is totally different. 

Sure it was built with Bootstrap but the 'noobness' looks at the early begining has been improved tremendously. Have a look yourself. 

So whats new on 2024. It's going to be an evolution journey for the Orderla ecosystem.

While we have improved internally the Orderla.my WhatsApp Quick Commerce Platform, we have also do a research on how to bring Orderla Quick commerce to become a normal commerce platform.

Orderla Quick Commerce platform offers a straightforward solution for creating online stores. It effectively addresses various challenges, such as presenting product information, managing inventory, setting limits, and facilitating smooth payments through an integrated payment gateway. Additionally, it streamlines the order fulfillment process by seamlessly integrating with delivery services, providing a comprehensive solution for merchants.

Then, we even push the envelop to support product that has variants, modifiers and custom note (this can be used with Cart-based form). 

However, it's a still self-contained ordering page that looks fairly simple. It's good for those who don't want to do much customization on the page.

But we just want to go beyond that. We are still in the midst to finalize the simplicity of Orderla that so much easy to check-out and combined with the e-commerce store platform that sells physical or digital items. 

Yes that is still on development and keep posted for our latest updates.

Till then.