E-commerce as a service
Consumer brands, retailers, and distributors operating on the web favored Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions over on-premises systems. In the former case, an external company hosts server infrastructure and provides all updated features, whereas on-premises e-commerce requires in-house infrastructure that must be fully managed by the enterprise running the store. In times of great customization and complex multichannel customer journeys, hosted e-commerce is often the ideal solution for companies willing to sell their products or services online.Shopify, WooCommerce, and Salesforce represent the biggest players in the hosted e-commerce market, with Shopify servicing the highest number of stores worldwide. They are ahead of website builder Squarespace, whose commerce revenue has significantly grown over the past two years. Financial figures indicate that most leading companies provide commerce services via all-in subscription packages.
Switching to headless commerce
Traditional online stores are also called monolithic because the back- and front-end of the website are connected into a combined infrastructure that is very difficult to maintain. For this reason, companies have switched to headless commerce, where front-end is independent from back-end, ‘the head’, and easy to customize and duplicate, for instance for mobile versions of online shops.Over six in ten retail companies plan to migrate to headless commerce platforms by 2024, while over 20 percent of them already use them. E-commerce shops based on headless systems can integrate with third-party applications and sale channels — from social networks to voice commerce, including augmented or virtual reality. Of all the companies valuing these benefits, the ones registering the highest appreciation rates were in the healthcare and hospitality sectors.
