A First-Class Customer Experience: Workshop with Contentstack at Make It Big 2022

It used to be that maintaining an online store was a hassle any time there was a major change for the merchant. Inventory updates? A new design trend? These things all meant a complete overhaul to an ecommerce website. 

Enter headless commerce. The decoupling of an online store’s frontend from the backend brings much needed flexibility and freedom of creation for merchants. 

Contentstack CEO Neha Sampat led a workshop about headless commerce at this year’s Make it Big conference with a primer on what headless is and a collection of user experience (UX) success stories.

Contentstack’s Key Takeaways at Make It Big 2022

A headless commerce presentation led by Contentstack’s Neha Sampat at BigCommerce’s 2022 Make it Big Conference delivered many insights for businesses that have deployed a headless commerce architecture or those that are planning to make the move to headless.

Here are a few key takeaways from this session:

In regards to content, Sampat explained headless’ utility for creating a hub.

“When we think about headless in the context of commerce and content, it’s really thinking about the fact that there is a place where a lot of the logic is taking place, a lot of the data exists. It’s the hub for content, for content in commerce data. But the head is all the different places where that content is being consumed.”

What are some benefits of headless?

From that hub Sampat mentioned, the delivery possibilities are wide-ranging.

“Headless means that you can connect and send content to any channel. Apps, mobile, digital, in-store kiosks, POS systems, whatever is where you’re consuming content. It’s all using APIs. It’s something that you cannot do easily with traditional suites or what I like to call ‘vintage suites.’ It made it almost impossible to do some of these things that are really cool and interesting, engaging and helping businesses move really fast with those traditional systems.”

How does headless compare to legacy systems?

When it comes to the ease of headless versus legacy systems, Sampat put it his way.

“If you think about what’s complex and you think about legacy systems that most people are still using, the status quo is actually very complex because you’ve got all of these systems and tools that have been put together that use very specialized skills in order to implement, and it’s not easy. This is where companies like BigCommerce and Contentstack are partnering together to make sure that we’re making it easy to adapt to the market.”

Who is adopting headless?

And finally, Sampat’s view on headless adoption.

“There is movement happening towards this type of adoption for both content and commerce. This microservices based approach to architecture is no longer an idea. It’s becoming the way. The train has left the station and many companies have joined and others are starting to dabble, and our belief is that this is going to be the way of the future.”

The Final Word

If you missed this session with Neha Sampat or would like to watch it again, you can register for free today for easy access to this and all Make it Big sessions, now available on-demand through the end of the year. 

Don’t forget to share your favorite Make it Big moments with us on social with #MakeitBigConf, and tag us @BigCommerce.