What Is Headless Shopify, and How It’s The Perfect E-Commerce Solution

As we all know, page speed affects conversion rates. In today’s world, if your e-commerce store does not load pages instantly, most people will take the high road and leave your website.

Jambaree builds Headless Ecommerce stores using Jamstack and NextJS development, and specifically focuses on Headless Shopify webstores. So no more worrying about bounces due to poor page speed performance.

Why Not Just Build A Full Shopify Store Vs Going Headless?

The question of why not build an out-of-the-box Shopify store gets asked quite frequently? Well for one, there are too many constraints with customizing pages and modules to do exactly what you want. 

Shopify pre-built templates are very limited, and don’t offer a lot of customization other than colors and fonts. What if you need a 3 column comparison chart with icons and graphics? What if you need a page that has a custom pricing slider, where sliding to the right shows different features and pricing tiers? Do you want your homepage to have specific special animations when scrolling down the page?

All these features would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to achieve with a Shopify templated site, unless the template you purchase specifically includes those features. We can assure you that all those basic features above are not included in any one template.

The other Shopify-only option would be to build a custom Shopify theme using their Liquid templating language. Yes, you may be able to accomplish some more complex functionality and design, but do you want to spend all this development time on something that you’ll be tied to a certain platform…forever? Liquid is Shopify’s own proprietary templating language, and that development/code will not work anywhere else but with Shopify. Wouldn’t it be nice to “own” your website, and have some freedom to choose other providers down the road vs everything all being in one perpetual Shopify basket?

And did we mention page speed? Yes there are ways to optimize a Shopify store’s page speed scores, but you don’t have the freedom to do what you want and have to deal with the platform’s constraints. This is especially true when you have any custom development, where optimizing that feature/functionality can be extremely difficult or impossible. 

These are just a few reasons why our e-commerce customers are now requesting Headless Shopify e-Commerce stores built on Jamstack.

Why Headless Shopify?

Jambaree takes the best of what Shopify has to offer, and we build you a custom website using NextJS (framework built on ReactJS, all open-source). This interface can be customized to do whatever you want, and look however you want it to look. 

And most of all, it’s lightning fast! 

Normal Shopify-only stores achieve subpar pagespeed scores at best, and aren’t easily optimized. Headless Shopify stores built with Jamstack can easily achieve 100 pagespeed scores out of the box, or with some very basic optimization.

Did we mention that our Headless Shopify development is one of the most secure e-commerce solutions out there? 

Since our NextJS Jamstack pages are statically rendered (using pre-built HTML pages), there is no communicating directly with an exposed database, and no PHP or SQL injection vulnerabilities that regularly happen on a traditional LAMP stack website (website running on Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP like WordPress, Drupal etc). What’s also cool is that we can “server-side-render” specific content to a page for real-time data display. In layman’s terms, this means if we need to pull the stock/quantity levels of a product, we would do a live fetch of that data when the page is loading, via an API call. Yes, we use APIs instead of communicating with a database that contains everything!

All The Best Qualities of Shopify In Our Jamstack Solution

We mentioned above that we take the best of what Shopify has to offer. Shopify’s biggest strengths are checkout handling and payment processing. Shopify is one of the largest e-commerce platforms out there, and therefore they have excellent fraud detection and their checkout interface has been split-tested to provide the best user experience when making a purchase.

If you’re looking for a secure, scalable, and easily maintainable screaming fast website, look no more. Drop us a line, we’d love to hear more about your project.