The growth of e-commerce shows no signs of stopping. According to the US Census Bureau, total ecommerce sales for 2023 increased by nearly 8% over the previous year. And online shoppers want more than a static website with a complicated, multistep checkout. The Harvard Business Review found that 73% of online shoppers use multiple channels in their shopping journey—and those that do spend 10% more online.
Embracing Headless Checkout: Enhancing Omnichannel Buying Experiences
To better reach, engage, and convert today’s omnichannel buyers, many retailers are going “headless” by decoupling the front and back end of their website. With headless ecommerce, you can create storefront experiences that engage customers directly in the channels they are using. Beyond just your online store, you can reach buyers through a digital publication, a video game, a QR code, interactive chat, and much more.
Tackling Cart Abandonment with Headless Checkout
But even for retailers with a robust omnichannel experience, cart abandonment remains a massive challenge. According to the Baymard Institute, the average abandoned cart rate in 2024 is over 70%. And the numbers get worse as devices get smaller. According to a study by Barilliance, mobile phone users abandoned their carts a whopping 85% of the time.
Optimizing Checkout Experience with Headless Checkout
One of the best ways to tackle cart abandonment is to reduce friction and optimize the checkout experience. Adopting headless checkout gives you a flexible toolkit for reducing cart abandonment. It can also fuel a simpler, more intuitive buying experience across all the channels your customers use to engage with your brand.
Understanding Headless Checkout: What is It?
With headless checkout, the checkout and payment processes are separated from the back end of an online store. This allows for “on the spot” purchasing across multiple touchpoints, such as a promotional email, sponsored article, social post, a QR code at an event, and much more. Using headless checkout, online shoppers can fully complete a retail transaction without having to go to your e-commerce website at all.
The Benefits of Headless Checkout
As we’ve discussed earlier, headless checkout allows you to offer a robust buying experience across channels. This simpler, one-click buying experience can help improve engagement, drive sales, and reduce cart abandonment. Headless checkout also gives technical teams a way to innovate faster, and it provides businesses with important data that allows them to invest more strategically.
The Risks of Headless Checkout
For all the benefits headless checkout offers, it also has its challenges. It can require a significant technical investment to restructure your e-commerce website. Headless checkout can also make your overall e-commerce strategy more complex as you offer more ways to buy.
Building a Scalable Checkout Experience with Shopify Checkout Extensibility
Enterprise online retailers can meet multiple business goals by engaging their different customer bases where they are and providing a buying experience that fits their preferences. But this can also mean building multiple, unique front-end customizations to increase conversions within each customer segment and each touchpoint. This approach can ramp up complexity very quickly if you are building your headless checkout from scratch.
Conclusion
Shopify provides a reliable, ready-to-scale platform for even the largest enterprise retailers in need of a customizable checkout solution. Scalability can be an issue with some platforms, especially around Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM). If your checkout slows down or times out on the biggest purchasing days of the year, that’s revenue you’ll never get back.
E-Startups Kenya, an IT consultancy firm located in Nairobi Kenya, can help businesses leverage headless checkout technology to enhance their e-commerce revenue and provide seamless omnichannel buying experiences. Whether you’re looking to reduce cart abandonment, optimize checkout processes, or scale your e-commerce operations, E-Startups Kenya has the expertise to guide you through every step of the process.
