Enhancing Headless Commerce Personalization With a Product Configurator
In this article, you’ll learn about headless commerce and how it enhances personalization, particularly when coupled with a product configurator.
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Customer experience is a vital part of any eCommerce initiative. After all, customers are willing to pay a premium of up to 16% more for a consistently excellent online experience—and that’s without considering other benefits, such as higher engagement and loyalty. To that end, it shouldn’t be a surprise that 69% of customers expect these experiences to be tailored to their unique needs.
By adopting a headless commerce architecture, retailers can build and deliver consistent digital experiences no matter the channel. Headless commerce also enables retailers to adapt to newer channels, integrate best-of-breed solutions, and drive better marketing campaigns.
Building a truly personalized experience into your eCommerce presence can take many forms: tailored product content, targeted emails and ads, product configurators, and personalized notifications.
In this article, you’ll learn about headless commerce and how it enhances personalization, particularly when coupled with a product configurator.
Shifting from Monolith to MACH: What It Means for Personalization
Customers today navigate through several digital platforms, including email, social media, apps, websites, and AR/VR. To ensure consistency across all of these platforms, many brands are switching from traditional eCommerce platforms to headless commerce platforms. These headless platforms align with the principles of the MACH architecture, which are microservice-based, API-first, cloud-native, and most importantly, implement a headless architecture.
A key driving force for this transition towards MACH is personalization. Retailers want uniqueness and flexibility in delivering personalized experiences, something that a monolithic platform fails to provide. Building your eCommerce architecture in line with the principles of MACH will equip you with the flexibility needed to deliver unique and innovative interfaces and experiences for your customers.
Daniel Backhaus - Chief Strategy Officer
Is Personalization Easier With Headless Commerce?
Headless commerce separates the frontend or client-facing interface of an eCommerce platform from its backend where the server-side operations reside. This decoupling enables retailers to integrate independent third-party eCommerce solutions such as customer relationship management (CRM), shopping cart, payment gateway, content management system (CMS), and analytics engine via APIs.
Having a headless commerce architecture lets you stay agile in adjusting to modern market changes and demands. This flexibility enables you to deliver composable commerce experiences. For instance, if you have a promotions engine that’s not delivering as expected, you can swap it out for another without breaking your site or suffering from unnecessary downtime. It future-proofs your architecture, providing you with the tools to offer consistent omnichannel commerce experiences.
Let’s have a look at how headless commerce supports personalization better than traditional commerce platforms:
- Unique brand design: Retailers using traditional commerce platforms are limited in creativity and design with regard to their interfaces or integrations. Because of this, they end up with generic designs and customer experiences that are indistinguishable from other brands. In contrast, headless commerce gives enterprises the opportunity to create personalized interfaces that meet your brand's specific needs and help them stand out from the competition.
- Seamless integrations: Developers working on traditional eCommerce platforms leverage plug-ins to enable personalization, but their performance and stability are no match for API-driven headless solutions. Headless commerce allows for “commerce syndication”, which makes it possible to create more targeted experiences for specific customer personas by incorporating commerce into a blog or site.
- Omnichannel support: Serving content or products across multiple channels is a key benefit of the headless approach. Most traditional eCommerce platforms are built to serve content to specific channels or frontend frameworks. This presents a challenge in delivering consistent and personalized content to multiple channels. By embracing headless commerce, you can deliver optimized content across all your channels no matter the framework or language that was used to build it.
Daniel Backhaus - Chief Strategy Officer
How Product Configurators Enhance Personalization
The goal of personalized commerce is to provide customers with precisely what they want, and this is impossible without configuration options. Even though product configurators are not personalization engines, they enhance personalized experiences by making the customers a part of the design process.
By implementing a product configurator, customers can tailor the elements of a product to suit their needs and visualize the changes as they make them. For example, a buyer can customize a kitchen cabinet by adjusting the dimensions, the number of compartments, color, and material while watching the price change in real-time based on their choices.
There are two variations of product configurators: headless product configurators and template-based product configurators. Template-based product configurators are similar to traditional eCommerce platforms due to their limited customization and integration options. Conversely, headless product configurators are built on the principles of headless commerce. They allow you to create customized interfaces using any programming language of choice. You can create unique customer experiences by leveraging its API-driven architecture to integrate with other best-of-breed solutions.
With a headless product configurator, retailers can gather a comprehensive overview of their customers’ preferences. This holistic data makes it easier to segment customers into personas and create targeted ads and products. In turn, this leads to better customer engagement, higher conversion and sales, fewer returns, and a significant increase in ROI.
Razi Alakhdar - Marketing Manager
Build Personalized Shopping Experiences With Salsita 3D Configurator
Personalization is becoming increasingly necessary for manufacturers as they strive to adapt and deliver relevant experiences for customers. Headless solutions help these enterprises tailor their offerings to their customers and enable them to deliver relevant information across multiple channels.
A headless product configurator can make a significant contribution to a company's personalization efforts. In addition to enabling businesses to design unique customer journeys, it also allows them to gather insight from customers who use the configurator to offer customized product selections and inform future product designs.
Salsita 3D Configurator is an API-driven headless solution, leveraged by brands across multiple industries to build omnichannel eCommerce stores.
If you’re interested in knowing more about headless product configurators, be sure to check out this article on product configurators.
