E-commerce platforms

Headless commerce

Online shop architecture

Headless commerce is a shop architecture where the front end is decoupled from the back end and connected via an API, so one engine can serve many channels.

What is Headless commerce?

Headless commerce is an approach in which the shop’s back end (products, cart, orders, payments) is separated from the front end the customer sees, with the two layers communicating through an API. One back end can feed a website, a mobile app, a B2B portal or marketplace integrations. It is an architecture rather than a specific product – Medusa.js is one of the engines built around it.

How we use it at Koda Plus

We build headless shops on Medusa: the back end exposes an API and the storefront is a separate application, most often in Next.js – that is how the tyre and wheel shop works. In a platform for beauty salons, a single back end handles wholesale orders from salons and retail sales across several markets with their own currencies. On Astro websites we plug in a headless CMS when editors need an admin panel but the site should stay static. For a simple shop with one sales channel we say plainly that headless is often overkill.

Used in

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When it makes sense

  • You sell across several channels from one data source
  • The front end should be designed from scratch, free of theme limits
  • The shop is part of a wider system with an ERP and warehouse
  • You have a team or partner to maintain two layers

Frequently asked questions
Headless commerce

  • What does headless e-commerce mean?

    It is a shop where the commerce logic is separated from the layer the customer sees, with the two exchanging data through an API. In practice you can change the shop’s design or add a new sales channel without rebuilding the cart and order handling.

  • Is a headless shop faster than a traditional one?

    It can be, but not automatically. Headless lets you build a front end without the weight of someone else’s template and serve it from a CDN, yet a poorly designed front end can be slower than a well-built monolith.

  • Headless or a traditional shop – which should I choose?

    A traditional shop, such as WooCommerce or PrestaShop, gets off the ground faster with one channel and standard rules. Headless pays off when you actually use what it offers – multiple channels, your own front end and non-standard processes – but it means two layers to build and maintain.

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