BigCommerce Headless Commerce: Everything You Need to Know

BigCommerce Headless Commerce: Everything You Need to Know

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The ecommerce landscape is rapidly evolving, and the demand for bespoke, omnichannel shopping experiences is on the rise. Headless commerce is a modern approach to ecommerce that enables businesses to achieve unprecedented flexibility and customization by decoupling the frontend presentation layer (the “head”) from the backend ecommerce functionality. This separation allows developers to utilize their preferred frontend technologies and content management systems (CMS) while leveraging the robust ecommerce capabilities of a specialized platform like BigCommerce.

Table of Contents

The Advantages of BigCommerce Headless Commerce

BigCommerce stands out as a powerful headless commerce solution specifically designed to tackle the complexities of enterprise-level ecommerce needs. By choosing BigCommerce for your headless implementation, you gain a host of advantages:

  • Leverage Your Existing Skills: Unlike monolithic platforms that dictate specific frontend frameworks, BigCommerce allows you to use the tools you’re most comfortable with. Whether your team excels in React, Vue.js, Angular, or another framework, you have the freedom to build your storefront without learning a new technology.
  • Integrate with Existing Tech Stacks: BigCommerce seamlessly integrates with your current technology investments. This avoids vendor lock-in and lets you maximize the value of existing systems like WordPress, Contentful, or Prismic for content management.
  • Separation of Concerns: Headless with BigCommerce allows you to choose the best tools for each specific task. Your content team can work efficiently within their preferred CMS while your developers focus on crafting a custom frontend experience using the most suitable technologies.
  • Omnichannel Opportunities: A single BigCommerce backend can power multiple sales channels, unifying your ecommerce operations. With headless, you can manage your product catalog, inventory, customers, and orders centrally while selling across various platforms like headless storefronts, marketplaces, mobile apps, and B2B platforms.

Understanding the Core Concepts

To effectively utilize BigCommerce for headless commerce, it’s essential to grasp a few key concepts that underpin their approach:

  • Channels: In BigCommerce, a “channel” represents any outlet where you sell products. This includes not only your primary website but also marketplaces like Amazon or eBay, point-of-sale systems, and even individual headless storefronts. This concept allows you to manage and track sales across all your touchpoints from a single location.
  • Listings: Products in your BigCommerce catalog are “listed” on specific channels. This granular control allows you to curate product offerings for each channel based on your target audience and business strategy. For instance, you might have a different set of products listed on your wholesale channel compared to your retail website.
  • Sites and Routes API: This API is specifically designed for headless implementations. It allows you to define the domain names and key page paths (e.g., homepage, product pages, cart, checkout) for your headless channels. This ensures that emails, links, and customer interactions are directed to the correct storefront, maintaining a consistent experience.

Tackling Headless Ecommerce Complexities

While displaying products, managing carts, and processing checkouts are fairly straightforward in a headless setup, BigCommerce recognizes that real-world ecommerce is often much more intricate. To address this, they’ve developed a robust set of APIs and features to handle complex scenarios that go beyond the basic purchase funnel. Here are a few examples:

  • Customer Account Syncing and Security: Managing customer accounts across multiple platforms, especially when using a separate CMS or app for your storefront, requires careful consideration. BigCommerce provides mechanisms to securely sync accounts, keeping passwords and personal information up-to-date while ensuring a seamless login experience across all channels.
  • Handling Gift Certificates, Coupons, and Discounts: Implementing promotional offers in a headless environment can be challenging. BigCommerce’s APIs allow you to seamlessly manage gift certificates, coupons, and discounts across all your channels, ensuring consistency and accurate application of discounts.
  • Real-Time Inventory Updates: Accurate inventory management is crucial for any ecommerce business. BigCommerce offers solutions for real-time inventory updates across all headless storefronts, preventing overselling and providing customers with accurate product availability information.
  • Analytics Tracking: Tracking website traffic and conversion data is essential for understanding customer behavior and optimizing your business strategy. BigCommerce provides tools and guidance for proper analytics tracking across all your headless channels, ensuring that your data is comprehensive and accurate.
  • Currency and Tax Display: For businesses selling internationally, managing currency and tax display for different storefronts can be complex. BigCommerce’s APIs enable you to synchronize these settings with the backend store, ensuring that customers see accurate pricing and tax information based on their location and currency.
  • Advanced Features: BigCommerce’s headless approach extends to supporting features like abandoned cart notifications, wishlist functionality, transactional emails, customer-specific pricing, multi-region support, and multi-language support. They offer a comprehensive solution for tackling the full spectrum of ecommerce needs in a headless environment.

Headless Checkout Options with BigCommerce

Checkout is perhaps the most critical aspect of any ecommerce website, as it involves handling sensitive customer payment information. BigCommerce offers multiple headless checkout options, allowing you to choose the approach that best balances security, development effort, and control over the user experience. Bigcommerce headless checkout is a major selling point of this platform.

  • Redirect to BigCommerce Checkout: This option involves redirecting the shopper from your headless storefront to the BigCommerce checkout page, which is hosted on their secure servers. It minimizes development effort and PCI compliance responsibilities but results in a less seamless experience as the customer is redirected to a different domain.
  • Self-Hosted Checkout: This option gives you maximum control over the checkout user interface (UI) and user experience (UX), allowing for deep customization. However, it significantly increases development effort and requires you to assume full responsibility for PCI compliance.
  • Embedded Checkout: This option offers a good balance between security, development effort, and control. It involves embedding an iframe of the BigCommerce checkout page within your headless storefront. This keeps the shopper on the same domain, providing a smoother experience, while leveraging BigCommerce’s PCI-compliant infrastructure.

BigCommerce Checkout Javascript SDK:

To simplify checkout UI customization, BigCommerce provides the Checkout JavaScript SDK, an NPM package that offers a library of convenience methods. This SDK abstracts away some of the complexity of interacting with payment gateways, making it easier to build a custom checkout experience. It also includes support for the “Embedded Checkout” option.

Building a Headless Storefront with BigCommerce: Practical Examples

To demonstrate how these concepts work in practice, let’s walk through two scenarios for building a headless storefront with BigCommerce. These examples showcase the versatility of their approach and highlight the key steps involved.

Scenario 1: Embedded Checkout with WordPress and BigCommerce

This scenario demonstrates how to integrate BigCommerce with WordPress, using the “Embedded Checkout” option to provide a streamlined checkout experience within the WordPress website. The BigCommerce for WordPress plugin, which is free and open-source, provides a ready-made solution for getting started.

  • Step 1: Install and Configure the BigCommerce for WordPress Plugin

Download and install the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory. Connect the plugin to your BigCommerce store by providing your store API credentials. The plugin will create essential ecommerce pages like your cart page, account pages, and checkout page.

  • Step 2: Manage Products in BigCommerce

Use the BigCommerce backend to create and manage your product catalog, including product details, pricing, inventory, and images. The plugin will automatically sync these products to your WordPress site, creating custom post types for easy management.

  • Step 3: Create a WordPress Channel in BigCommerce

In the BigCommerce backend, navigate to the Channels section and create a new channel for your WordPress site. This will allow you to list specific products for this channel and track its performance separately.

  • Step 4: Define a Checkout Route for the Channel

Use the BigCommerce Sites and Routes API to define a site (your domain name) and route (path to the checkout page) for the WordPress channel. This ensures that transactional emails and links will point back to the correct checkout page.

  • Step 5: Customize Product Display and Checkout Journey

Utilize WordPress themes, page builders, and other frontend tools to customize the look and feel of your store. The plugin handles the integration with BigCommerce, displaying products, managing carts, and directing customers to the embedded checkout page.

  • Step 6: The Embedded Checkout Experience

When a shopper is ready to checkout, they will be directed to the WordPress checkout page, which will load the BigCommerce checkout page in an embedded iframe. Customers complete the entire purchase process within this iframe, staying on the WordPress domain.

  • Step 7: Order Management in BigCommerce

Completed orders are processed by BigCommerce and can be managed within the BigCommerce backend. The order data will be associated with the correct WordPress channel, allowing you to track sales and performance.

Scenario 2: Embedded Checkout with a React App

This scenario showcases a custom headless implementation using React and the BigCommerce Checkout Javascript SDK. It involves creating a simple React app that fetches product data from BigCommerce and provides an embedded checkout experience using the SDK.

  • Step 1: Set up a React Project

Create a new React project using Create React App or your preferred method. Install the @bigcommerce/checkout-sdk package using NPM.

  • Step 2: Implement API Calls to BigCommerce

Use the BigCommerce REST or GraphQL APIs to fetch product data, create carts, and manage customer accounts. You can use libraries like Axios or Apollo Client to make API calls and handle responses. The Bigcommerce headless api documentation is extensive and should guide you through this process.

  • Step 3: Create a Channel for the React App

Use the BigCommerce Channels API to create a new channel dedicated to the React app. This will allow for managing product listings and tracking performance for this specific storefront.

  • Step 4: Define a Site and Route for the Checkout Page

Utilize the Sites and Routes API to define a domain and route for the checkout page of your React app.

  • Step 5: Implement Embedded Checkout with the SDK

Use the embedCheckout function from the BigCommerce Checkout Javascript SDK to load the embedded checkout iframe within a designated container in your React component. Pass the checkout URL retrieved from the BigCommerce API to this function.

  • Step 6: Customize Checkout UI with the SDK

Leverage the Checkout Javascript SDK’s convenience methods to customize aspects of the checkout UI, such as signing in customers, adding addresses, managing shipping methods, and applying discounts, without having to directly interact with the underlying payment gateway integrations.

  • Step 7: Secure Checkout Implementation

Always ensure that your checkout implementation is secure, using SSL/HTTPS to protect customer data. When using a self-signed SSL certificate for local development, configure your browser to trust the certificate to avoid warnings and errors.

Bigcommerce headless pricing is a factor to consider when choosing a headless solution. BigCommerce offers tiered pricing plans based on features and sales volume, with options for both monthly and annual billing. Their Enterprise plan provides custom pricing tailored to high-volume businesses and includes advanced features like unlimited API calls and custom product filtering.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):

Can BigCommerce handle event tickets or other unique product types in a headless setup?

Yes, BigCommerce can handle event tickets or other unique product types in a headless setup. You can leverage their custom fields and APIs to define specific attributes for unique product types, enabling you to tailor your headless storefront to suit specialized needs.

What’s the best approach for integrating BigCommerce with WordPress and React – calling the BigCommerce API directly or syncing through the WordPress REST API?

The best approach for integrating BigCommerce with WordPress and React depends on your project’s specific requirements. Calling the Bigcommerce headless api directly from your React frontend offers real-time data synchronization and tight coupling between systems. Syncing data through the WordPress REST API simplifies development and provides a more decoupled approach.

Can you extend BigCommerce functionality with plugins similar to WooCommerce?

While BigCommerce doesn’t have a plugin system identical to WooCommerce, it offers robust extensibility through its API and app marketplace. You can develop custom integrations and connect with various third-party services to enhance your store’s capabilities.

Conclusion

BigCommerce is a leading player in the headless commerce space, offering a comprehensive and robust platform for businesses seeking to build highly customized and scalable ecommerce solutions. Their powerful APIs, flexible checkout options, and extensive documentation provide developers with the tools needed to create unique and engaging shopping experiences across multiple channels. As businesses continue to prioritize omnichannel strategies and personalized customer journeys, BigCommerce’s commitment to headless commerce empowers them to deliver exceptional digital experiences that drive growth and customer loyalty.