Demystifying Headless Commerce With Brian Anderson

Welcome to Long Love Retail, a series exploring the art and science of retail through the eyes of the people who live and love it!

Hey, it’s great to see you here! I’m Ben, welcome to Long Love Retail. Every month, I’m featuring an interview with someone changing the way we think about commerce, online and offline — founders and CEOs, engineers and marketing gurus, shoppers and analysts … and maybe even a historian or social scientist for good measure.

As for me? I was brought up folding jeans in my parents’ denim stores and founded Diff to help demystify ecommerce. I’ve always loved retail — helping people connect with products that mean something to them. Looking forward to sharing stories here.

Demystifying headless commerce with Brian Anderson

Brian Anderson is founder, CEO and a product architect at commerce platform, Nacelle. An API that separates frontend from backend to make for better customer experiences, Nacelle has helped brands like Something Navy and Privacy Pop manage high traffic volumes and improve product discoverability. Known as the “the headless horseman of headless commerce”, who better to demystify headless and take us through the new opportunities for digital-first customer experiences from doing it right?!

First things first: What do you love most about working in ecommerce? Hands down — the merchants we work with every day. It’s amazing to see what they build with hard work, dedication and innovation. You can see how much love goes into building these brands and, as an entrepreneur, it’s just so inspiring.

Favorite retail memory … ever. The first time I walked into FAO Schwarz in Rockefeller Plaza, New York as a kid. My mind was just blown away; I don’t remember the toys I walked out with, but I do remember the experience of walking through that wonderland.

For newbies, what is headless commerce? How would you explain it to a 10 year old? It’s the separation between the website and the data system that powers the website. Think of an old electrical outlet where you need adapters to make it work with your new, modern kitchen appliances. That is non-headless. But, headless ensures that you never need that adapter because the outlet itself will universally work with any technology, now and in the future.

Why does headless commerce matter? We need to look at three mega trends to really understand why!

a) An uptick in mobile usage (driven by Facebook, Instagram and mobile web search). Today, it’s not uncommon to see merchants with 80% to 90% mobile traffic, but five years ago it was more of a 50/50 split between desktop and mobile.

b) The demand for a quality mobile experience. Consumers expect a brand’s webstore to function like Instagram or a Google web search. That is a high bar and it demands a low latency shopping experience.

c) This is the one often missed by the ecomm world — the velocity of innovation for front end (website) technology is extraordinarily high and continues to accelerate every year. A new framework is in and out of vogue every seven or eight months. It doesn’t make sense to couple your entire store to just one front end technology when things get old so quickly. If you’re using old technology, it’s much harder to compete in the marketplace. Instead, you can build a strong headless foundation, and pick the front end technology that’s best for you now (knowing that if you have to upgrade in the future, you won’t have to rip out your entire system, just the piece that needs the upgrade!).

What do you think the biggest challenge is in moving to a headless build? It’s not just a low-code or no-code solution. Headless and low-code/no-code are like oil and water. If you want low-code, then Shopify is so, so good out of the box. But, when a brand finds strong product-market fit they begin to realize that investing in a few engineers or hiring a developer-strong agency is a no-brainer: the ROI is strong. And that’s the rub with headless: you need engineers who know how to leverage and manipulate APIs and SDKs to build something extraordinary for your webstore. If you don’t have this asset in-house and you refuse to pay for a top tier agency, then headless is going to be very challenging, even with systems like Nacelle!

Tell us about the most memorable headless retail experience you had within the last year (could be a customer example). Barefoot Dreams is a phenomenal shopping experience — it’s fast, snappy, looks great and it’s easy to find something special for yourself or someone else. 10/10.

At Diff, a big part of our focus is on humanizing retail, how is headless helping to maintain the human element in ecommerce? I think being human is all about celebrating our uniqueness. I think brands that do the best understand this and ensure that they’re not a simple “template store.” In fact, I might make the argument that stores become brands when they emphasize both their uniqueness and their customer’s uniqueness! So headless, with its extraordinary ability to blend commerce and content without boundaries, is a great way to bring this human element into the mix.

The next big retail trend (that no one is talking about yet) is … This is more of a tech retail trend but consent management! I can’t tell you how many systems track me when I visit an online store even though I never gave them consent to do so. I think it is a potential atomic bomb that will be set off sooner rather than later.

In the spirit of #buylocal, what’s one of your favorite local businesses in Santa Monica? The Leaf and Petal in Santa Monica is a gorgeous plant nursery that my partner and I adore.

One easy thing we can do to make the world of retail healthier, more sustainable and more human. My partner and I made some personal OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) this year around sustainability. We want to try to buy at least 50% sustainable. We also swapped our gas powered car for an electric one (we figure after driving for decades in gas powered cars this one was an all or nothing, no more gas cars for us).

From Ben: What’s in my basket

The Distracted Mind by Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen. This is a well-researched book exploring why our brains aren’t built for media multitasking, and how we can learn to live with technology in a more balanced way. I’ve waged my own battles against the distractions of smartphones and this book made me realize it’s not just me! Cell phones are extraordinarily distracting and can change our behavior in ways that we’re really only just starting to quantify with science.

Retail Roundup

• Too much choice can be a bad thing. Coach and Kohl’s are just two of the retailers cutting down their product styles to make decision-making easier for consumers.
• The Canadian marketplace best known for what it isn’t, Not Amazon is driving shoppers to buy local.
• New Year’s resolutions not going so well? Commit to being terrible at something for 30 days instead.

Riff with Diff

What would you like to see here in future editions? Riff with me here by leaving a comment below or send me a Tweet. You never know, your comments, questions and ideas could be featured here!

Thank you to Brian Anderson for being our inaugural guest and sharing his headless expertise — and thanks to you for reading along. If you liked this issue, follow me on Medium or LinkedIn for more insight from the folks who are innovating retail. And, by all means, please share this with a retailer you know who’s looking to up their game or wants to share their journey — better commerce, better world!