API First And Headless Commerce = A Huge Business Advantage
By Arthur Lawida, President, commercetools, Inc.
When we discuss things like API first platforms or headless commerce, we often find the marketing side of the house running for the exits. The discussion seems way too technical and the advantages don’t seem to easily translate into advantages for their day to day jobs.
As a leader in this approach, commercetools constantly struggles to craft the message in a way that the business and marketing can digest. We are, in essence, a technical solution to a business problem. In this post, I am going to do my very best to convince people that API First platforms, cloud commerce as a service and headless commerce platforms will provide the single biggest advantage to ecommerce business people that they can gain in the next few years.
API First
Today, every commerce platform in the world has an API of some kind. What this usually means is that they have taken the majority of the things that developers want to do with their platform and exposed them to developers through an API. The API is an afterthought.
For clarity, an API is a way to get access to a platform from another application. For instance you could imagine an in-store kiosk on an iPad that wants to show customers things that are available to buy from the company but not physically in the store. The developer could write an iPad app that uses a platform’s API to query the central platform to see what products are not available and then display them on the app. This app might check products and inventory location but touch nothing else inside the platform.
This API then sits on top of their monolithic platform. And here is a major difference between having an API and designing a platform to be API first. Say the business wants to create an application that will provide product information to a lot of potential customers but doesn’t want to include any other commerce functionality. You could imagine a mobile app that helps people pick accessories. In a traditional, monolithic platform, even if the solution accesses only a single API call, if the solution calls for accessing one of the API calls a lot (say getting product records) the company needs to buy the entire platform and pay for servers that enable the entire platform. If the application is used by thousands of users at the same time, the company will have to buy more servers and more licenses for the entire platform. That means more servers and more license costs due to the large number of requests for information through the API even though the actual solution is only accessing a small part of the functionality. The business pays for all of the functionality and only uses a small part.
Contrast that to API First. This approach creates a set of services where every API call is independent of every other API call. By its very nature, every function on the entire platform can only be accessed through the API. This means that if a marketer wants to create an app that displays the top 5 products, they can have their developers create a native app and just hit the few API calls that provide that info. And here’s the kicker. The business only pays for the cost of hitting those few API calls. There are no “platform” fee and , because we are in the cloud, we can scale those specific API calls without affecting anything else on the platform. There are no servers to buy, no extra license fees and the agility of creating these apps is measured in hours/days instead of weeks/months, even for the largest enterprises.
Why API First is in the interest of your business
Most people think that the discussion about APIs is a technical one - but that is wrong. It’s about business and business only. Here is why: Most commerce platforms we know had been built for the web at a time when consumers spent most of their internet time in front of desktop computers. These times have changed dramatically. Mobile usage outstripped desktop usage already in 2014 and keeps on growing at a faster pace. So what does that mean for business when mobile devices are by far more relevant than desktop computers (including laptops)? It means that they need a platform that puts commerce functionality first no matter of what and where the usage will happen. And this is what an API-focused platform does. It gives all the flexibility to support any device, any channel, any integration - from native shopping apps to digital shopping windows and wardrobes to classic shopping sites.
Headless Commerce
There is a big push going on in the software industry to have “headless” platforms. Our friends in the CMS space are also pushing in this direction. The idea behind having a platform being “headless” mostly revolves around separating the presentation layer from the business logic and functional layer.
There are a lot of great reasons for this.
- It allows UI developers to be very creative and not be limited by the functionality of the underlying platform in designing their solutions.
- It lowers development costs to businesses because by and large, web/UI developers cost less to hire than platform/full stack developers. This is simply because platform/full stack developers need months of specialized training on the development processes and platform itself while web/UI developers use a standardized, often open source process and toolset to deliver their solutions.
- It moves this effort from the IT department over to the marketing department where creative and front end developers usually live.
The key difference between standard “headless” platform and what we provide (unfortunately) lays in something even more technical but it’s crucial for business people to understand. In a common headless approach, there are two separated development areas, UI and Platform. In a headless platform that is API first (and cloud based), we are able to support a method of creating customizations called Microservices. This creates a much more agile/flexible environment to create commerce solutions.
The Result
Really huge, global companies are taking advantage of these approaches already and although we also work with them, commercetools has built a platform that can also make these advantages available to any company that has a business model that is complex or goes beyond a simple web shop. You will be hearing more about this in the future but now is the time to start planning for this new wave of technology.