#53: Is the Future of E-commerce Headless?

As e-commerce has developed as an industry, the old guard e-commerce tools are phasing out to make way for new guard: headless e-commerce. Our two guests today, Product Marketing Manager at Strapi, Anastasiia Shpiliak, and Ryan Szrama, founder of Centarro, discuss the benefits of headless e-commerce and how to achieve it with Strapi and Centarro.

Strapi + headless e-commerce

Strapi is an open source, Node.js based, headless CMS with an e-commerce solution. Why headless? As Anastasiia explains, Strapi has been headless from the beginning because, “the founders wanted to give other developers this great experience of integrating their own tools, choosing their own stack, and the freedom to do what they want with the frontend.” 

Headless enables online shopping, performant fast, and personalized shopping experiences much more easily than traditional monolithic systems, says Anastasiia. It’s also more future-proof and easier to deliver omnichannel experiences, especially with Strapi. Strapi’s headless e-commerce solution appeals to businesses who are keen on:

• Flexibility — spin up your own architecture and front end
• Speed and performance 
• Freedom to choose tools like a Stripe integration
• Freedom to self-host
• Test and deliver new pages quickly

Centarro + headless e-commerce

Centarro (formerly known as “Commerce Guys”) is Drupal’s headless e-commerce solution. Ryan explains Centarro further. “We natively extend the data model of Drupal so that all of the things it does for content management like extensible data structures, database querying workflow content moderation, the whole nine yards, all that applies equally to commerce data.” This allows you to run Drupal Commerce full-stack or headless. Ryan adds, “In a sense, it’s really similar to Strapi, but based on PHP instead of JavaScript.”

The Centarro headless e-commerce experience appeals to customers who are interested in:

• Scalability
• Performance 
• Better front-end customer experience — as Ryan specifies, “‘Better’ means nicer, faster, more responsive, and more modern-feeling.”
• Internationalization and expansion of their business

Try Strapi or Centarro for your move to a faster, e-commerce experience with an improved customer experience.

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