BigCommerce Doubles Down on Headless Commerce with BloomReach, Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager, and More

Today, we are excited to announce additional headless heads for ecommerce brands of all sizes as a CMS-agnostic headless checkout tool.

In Q4 2018, BigCommerce began to decouple the once stand-alone platform’s presentation layer via a WordPress plugin developed by Modern Tribe.

Since that launch, BigCommerce has partnered closely with additional agency partners and CMS solutions to build out headless commerce models applicable no matter the CMS you choose, including:

• WordPress, built and supported by Modern Tribe

• BloomReach, built and supported by Born Group

• Sitecore, built and supported by iMedia

• Adobe Experience Manager, built and supported by TA Digital

• Acquia ACF, built and supported by Third & Grove

• React + Gatsby, built and supported by Third & Grove

Our goal in these partnerships is to enable brands to leverage the technology stack instances that give them a unique competitive edge in the marketplace.

Moving Toward Microservice Architecture

Our decoupled presentation layer is only one of the many APIs and decoupled layers BigCommerce offers. In addition, our:

• Checkout API and SDK allows for fully customized checkout solutions

• Widgets API allows for fully customized site merchandising solutions

• Storefront API allows for fully customized personalization solutions

As BigCommerce moves more toward a micro-service architecture platform in this regard, we still maintain PCI compliance for our brands, as well as out-of-the-box integrations with payment providers, email service providers, ERPs, OMS tools, PIMs, tax software, shipping solutions, and more.

Why BigCommerce for a Decoupled Solution

The competitive retail environment requires brands to build strong digital experiences for their customers –– and no technology should be so biased as to stand in the way. After all, there’s only so much applicability a single all-in-one solution can provide to a diverse variety of businesses on a global scale. One size doesn’t fit all and specializing in commerce is only part of the equation.

Fashion brands have very different needs from a manufacturer of lightbulbs. A wholesale distributor of medical devices will operate very differently from a pillow startup focused on rapid growth via Instagram.

The one thing these businesses all have in common is to be able to quickly, efficiently, and securely solve for the ability to transact, fulfill orders, and deliver goods sold. This is where BigCommerce truly shines and being able to deliver these commerce services directly to where a merchant needs them to be is incredibly powerful.

Features of BigCommerce Headless Commerce

The features of headless commerce are conditional based on the head in question, but there are a few key features of BigCommerce’s headless commerce capabilities despite the CMS you use:

• Choose Your Front-End: With headless commerce, brands can choose what front-end they want to use for their business, regardless if BigCommerce has a formal connector available.

• API Speeds: Headless isn’t possible without API efficiency. BigCommerce APIs can process over 400 calls/second, are bi-directional, and publicly available.

• API Availability: BigCommerce currently makes over 90% of our platform accessible via API, allowing brands and agencies to bring as much or as little of the commerce engine into their environments.

• Documentation: We have public developer documentation and have open sourced our BigCommerce for WordPress plugin to help others build new headless implementations.

• Embedded, PCI-Compliant Checkout: Headless is different from simply redirecting web traffic from the primary domain to a “shop.mybrand” or “store.mybrand” instance. Our Checkout SDK allows brands to fully embed the end-to-end shopping experience in different front-ends and platforms, preserving the analytics and user tracking within that environment.

• Channels View: Manage multiple front-end experiences from a single BigCommerce Control Panel. Each shoppable experience is treated as a channel, much like Amazon or Facebook.

BigCommerce’s Headless Commerce Benefits for Brands

• Rely on a Stable, SaaS Foundation: Headless commerce exists with players like Elastic Path, CommerceTools, and Moltin, however, with those options, you’re having to build everything out. There is no “platform” in the background in place to manage commerce; you use their APIs and reference implementations to build commerce from scratch. BigCommerce’s approach brings a scalable commerce engine to the table and allows brands to embed that engine where it’s needed.

• Consolidated Commerce for Multi-Site Use Cases: Brands can spin up as many front-end experiences as they need, simultaneously powering multiple storefronts and consolidating the commerce experience into a single BigCommerce control panel view.

• Simplified & Highly Scalable Catalog: No need to code or install additional Woo apps to support complex catalogs. The BigCommerce platform solves for large, complex catalogs out-of-the-box, with the ability to serve up to 600 options/variants per product.

• Reduced Burden of PCI Compliance: Enhanced ecommerce security and peace of mind. Increase conversion and security with BigCommerce’s fully-embedded checkout. Deliver the fast, responsive checkout shoppers expect, while reducing the burden of PCI compliance.

• Best of Both (Dev) Worlds: You don’t have to choose between using a CMS or an ecommerce platform. Instead, leverage the utility of both to harness the creation of immersive online experiences. With our approach to headless, brands can extend their connectors to make use of the full functionality of the front-end while also tapping into our apps as well.

• Platform Agnostic Approach to Multi-Channel: You no longer need to have the rip-and-replace conversation with headless commerce. Brands can continue to use the tools they prefer, developers can tap into BigCommerce’s extensibility to enable commerce where it’s needed (regardless of CMS), and brands can reduce their tech debt burden by integrating BigCommerce into their core tech stack (versus having to rip out/replace mission critical systems). This means that brands aren’t limited to a single tech stack; they can literally run a BigCommerce storefront, 10 WordPress sites, a custom mobile device checkout built in React, and a few Drupal sites…all from the same BigCommerce instance.

• Highly Extensible: Our connectors utilize BigCommerce APIs to bring product data and commerce functionality into the desired front-end platform. Developers can continue to build on, enhance, customize, and extend additional aspects of the core BigCommerce platform using our APIs and webhooks to build truly unique front-end experiences.

• Hub or Spoke: Headless commerce is just the beginning. By enabling brands to use BigCommerce APIs to take our backend commerce engine into the front-end experience platforms of the world, we’ve begun our journey of platform decoupling. To that end, the utility and placement of the BigCommerce platform is largely up to the merchant’s needs to determine where we’ll sit. Sometimes, we’ll be the hub, being the primary system that all other systems plug into. Other times, we;’ll be a smaller hub, or even spoke, helping connect systems together that have their resulting functionality delivered elsewhere. And that’s just how we like it.

Overview of BigCommerce for WordPress

BigCommerce has developed a WordPress plugin that brings together the flexibility and openness of the WordPress platform with the scalability and robust commerce engine that is BigCommerce. WordPress was our first iteration of headless commerce.

WordPress is a robust and highly extensible Content Management System (CMS), built for just that: content management. At scale (think $250k GMV+), managing a catalog, orders, shipping, etc inside of a platform built for content (not commerce) becomes challenging for a number of reasons.

WordPress delivers the front-end experience (website) while BigCommerce handles the commerce-specific aspects of the website (catalog management, transactions, order/shipping management, etc).                                                                     

With BigCommerce for WordPress, we’re providing a much needed solution to the WordPress community that solves for scalability issues faced by WooCommerce merchants. More importantly, it opens up our platform’s ability to serve the complex content and experience needs of brands who prefer working in an open source ecosystem vs. locked into a SaaS platform.

Overview of BigCommerce for BloomReach

BigCommerce for BloomReach taps into the efficiency of our platform APIs, allowing merchants to seamlessly integrate BigCommerce and BrX, blending the worlds of content and commerce for truly connected experiences.

Streamline how quickly you take ideas to market at scale. Create robust, customer experiences and deploy in as little as six weeks with a design-first commerce solution that delivers engaging, personalized online buying experience.

Overview of BigCommerce for Sitecore

SitecoreExtend for BigCommerce is an app launched by iMedia that will allow Sitecore CMS users to offer a more extensive commerce solution. The app eliminates the need to manage product data in two places and enables users to maintain rich content alongside a powerful commerce experience delivered by BigCommerce.

Overview of BigCommerce for Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) brings together a content management system (CMS) and digital asset management (DAM) in a single place.

It’s a comprehensive solution for building websites, mobile apps, and forms, directly alongside marketing content and assets.

Our BC4AEM integration was built by our partner TA Digital.

Overview of BigCommerce for Acquia ACF

Acquia Commerce Manager provides a secure method for connecting a Drupal website to your commerce platform, enabling you to provide the products and services your customers need.

Overview of BigCommerce for React & Gatsby

The biggest benefit of the BigCommerce integration with Gatsby is that Gatsby is lightning fast. It’s a static site generator, so the build process outputs a directory of static HTML and JavaScript files files. The frontend is built on React and the data layer is built on GraphQL –– two technologies that make Gatsby especially attractive to developers.

Gatsby uses source plugins to pull data into Gatsby from a wide range of sources –– from a CMS, static files, or a REST API. This ability allows Gatsby to connect to just about any platform –– including BigCommerce.

Conclusion

As brands look to ensure growth in a time of changing digital experiences, headless commerce is a surefire way to create a customized content experience without having to recreate the wheel — which saves you both time and expenses.

Whether you’re looking to create a harmonious content-forward commerce experience, or want a simple built-in shopping functionality on your website, BigCommerce is lockstep with you in identifying a solution that works for your brand now and five years from now.

We’re just getting started. As more large-scale technologies decouple the layers of their platform, users will continuously find ways to customize web experiences that match the growing demand that consumers have for innovative marketing and user experiences.