How to evaluate headless architectures in your software search
When choosing any new software platform, there are many buying criteria that will help drive your decision. Product fit, price, vendor viability, service, and technology all play a role. In many cases, when evaluating technology, you might find yourself looking at one product with a headless architecture, and another with a more traditional architecture. This article will help you better understand the pros and cons of these architectures so that you can make a more informed business decision when it comes to technology. It will also describe how Gung’s architecture works, and why it delivers the best of both worlds.
So, to start, what does headless even mean?
The shortest explanation is that, in a headless solution, your product data and your business process data (the “body,” if you will) is not directly connected to or dependent on the presentation of that same data (i.e., the “head”).
Older e-commerce platforms have been built based on the assumption that all data would be presented according to a specific template design. As a result, data becomes confined to being usable in a single, predefined way. By removing the head, a headless platform has the ability to create a custom presentation/design layer for your data. If you want to modify that design in a product with an older architecture, there is typically a fairly hefty services fee because everything will need to be built from scratch.
In a headless architecture, you can select which data you want to appear, where it appears, and how it should look—and the headless architecture will simply “paint” the screen as you have defined it. You can display your products in a grid or a list, and you can choose which images appear, where the descriptions go, and how to display links and attachments.
The opposite of headless platform is a monolithic system that lacks flexibility. A monolithic system ties the display of products and processes so tightly tied to their locations that they become difficult to manage. For example, your product names are only structured in the code to be displayed in an e-commerce environment; if you want to display product names or any other product data in an online marketplace, customizations will be necessary.
Is headless the way to go?
In our opinion, neither of these two options—neither a headless platform nor a traditional monolithic system—are ideal when it comes to e-commerce software. One of the primary reasons is that implementing either type of system is time-consuming and expensive—when it doesn’t really have to be. We at Gung believe that if you have solid data in your ERP system, and a PIM system that augments that product data properly, you already have 90 percent of what you need to get started.
What is Gung’s approach?
Gung’s architecture technically has a “head,” but it doesn’t have the same disadvantages described above. We intentionally architected the product so that you can quickly be live with a functional (but still branded) system—displaying your unique product data (content) and processes (functionality). The data is organized in a way that it can be quickly put to work within Gung, while also being optimized to be published in any additional platforms via an API.
Aim Small, Miss Small
From day one, your start page, product listings, product pages, the entire checkout process, client order history, and a number of other views will be live in your Gung portal. You can change the fonts, colors and the logo in your portal to make the platform visually consistent with your branded materials—at least at a high level. If you still want to invest in making an order portal that really feels like your own, it is possible. However, we think it’s a better value to work on this phase after you have already deployed the most basic functions out of the box. Custom brand design often works well as a phase 2 effort, in combination with configuring Gung to align to some of your more unique business processes.
Come What May, Your Data is Ready
Product, customer and order data are saved in a separate database for a quick and direct connection to Gung, where a standard interface is in place that takes care of the most basic functions. Parallel to that, APIs and connections can be set up to other actors who need the data; such as a B2C platform, an online marketplace, or an inventory management system. None of these systems needs to slow down another one, and you can have several development projects running at the same time. With a well-thought-out data schema, you do not need to know how your entire system stack needs to work from the beginning. Gung’s simple and open architecture will be able to support your long-term e-commerce strategy and goals.
