Adobe Commerce Cloud launches “headless commerce” solution

Adobe Commerce Cloud has launched a “headless commerce” offering to serve the customer experience needs of enterprise clients. Adobe said the offering had been launched to help clients overcome four key challenges. First, the need to constantly innovate their digital customer experience at speed and scale. Second, to design coherent experiences across multiple touchpoints and technologies. Third, to eliminate data silos to effectively harness data and drive real-time decisioning. And fourth, to integrate new technologies, while minimizing disruptions to existing business operations.

Headless commerce accommodates an unlimited variety of web, social, mobile, IoT and in-store digital touchpoints, while separating them architecturally from the commerce platform, using APIs to deliver commerce services.

This improves flexibility to power a wide range of omnichannel scenarios, to commerce-enable any system, application or IoT device, and to seamlessly integrate with any content management system. A successful headless commerce strategy requires a rich array of capabilities that are open, extensible and easily consumable by developers that have little or no experience with the underlying commerce platform. These capabilities include flexible APIs, extensible microservices, new omnichannel integrations, and comprehensive management tools.

Adobe Commerce Cloud offers two sets of APIs out of the box: REST and GraphQL. Both platform extensibility and microservice layer technologies enable merchants to quickly extend and adopt APIs for all the different touchpoints and integration scenarios they may face. For brands needing to further extend or customize core business processes to support unique business scenarios, Adobe Commerce Cloud adds a microservices layer to GraphQL in order to extend commerce processes and support fully custom scenarios.

According to Adobe Analytics, the 2018 holiday season saw 51.4% of web visits from smartphones but only 31% of revenue from mobile. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are the latest evolution in mobile-driven commerce, delivering rich, native app experiences directly through mobile browsers. In addition to providing headless APIs to support PWAs, Adobe Commerce Cloud provides PWA Studio for creating and managing rich PWAs, as well as a sample PWA store to help accelerate deployment.

The Adobe Commerce Cloud headless solution also offers seamless integration with
other systems such as store point-of-sale, marketing and loyalty programs, and social and conversational commerce. As the system is decomposed, different components can be deployed independently, making it quick and easy to integrate new technologies since adding new components does not influence other components of the system.