Headless commerce

In headless commerce, the "head", the storefront that shoppers see, is separated from the commerce engine that handles products, carts, checkout and orders. The storefront is usually a custom website built with a modern web framework, and it talks to the commerce platform through an API.

Common setups include:

• Shopify headless, with a custom storefront on top of Shopify's storefront API, often using Shopify's own Hydrogen framework
• BigCommerce headless
• Open and enterprise platforms such as Medusa and commercetools

Brands go headless for speed, design freedom and the ability to mix content and commerce in ways a theme would not allow. It costs more to build and maintain, so it is mostly used by larger brands.

For researchers, headless stores are harder to identify. They do not load a standard Shopify theme and many app scripts look different. Detection relies on other clues, such as API calls to the commerce platform, checkout domains and public product feeds. RivalSonar covers headless stores alongside Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce and Webflow, although theme and app details are often not available for them.