When most people think about Shopify, they picture a fairly conventional ecommerce website.
You create your products, choose or customise a theme, organise them into collections and send customers through Shopify checkout.
And for a lot of ecommerce businesses, that’s exactly what Shopify should be.
But once you separate Shopify’s commerce engine from the frontend website, things get considerably more interesting.
With a headless Shopify setup, Shopify can continue doing the things it is really good at; managing products, inventory, pricing, carts, orders and checkout, while the website your customer interacts with can be designed and built completely independently.
Shopify describes its Storefront API as the foundation for these kinds of custom storefronts. It gives developers access to products, collections, pricing, carts and other commerce functionality while allowing them to choose how and where the customer experience is built.
At Consider, our approach uses a custom Next.js frontend built with React and TypeScript, connected to Shopify through the Storefront API and deployed through Vercel.
We’ve written separately about why we think this can be a better alternative to continually customising a Shopify theme and the theme debt that conventional stores can accumulate over time.
But there is another side to headless Shopify that we find particularly exciting:
You can start creating ecommerce experiences that wouldn’t naturally fit into a normal Shopify store at all.
Here are five examples.
1. Give your customer, club or organisation their own branded shop
This is a use case we’re currently exploring for businesses that supply products to multiple organisations.
Imagine a company supplying sports equipment and clothing to hundreds of clubs.
There might be a common pool of products available to everyone:
- balls;
- training equipment;
- general sportswear;
- accessories;
- consumables.
But Club A also has its own shirts, jackets and equipment.
Club B has a different kit.
Club C has another.
One way to build this in a conventional ecommerce system is to create a large master website and divide everything into categories or collections.
It works.
But from the customer’s perspective, it can still feel like they’re shopping inside somebody else’s enormous catalogue.
With headless Shopify, we can approach the problem differently.
Shopify becomes the central commerce engine containing the complete product catalogue.
Then we can create separate storefronts for the individual organisations.
For example:
shop.club-a.co.uk
Club A branding, Club A products and the relevant shared products.
shop.club-b.co.uk
Club B branding, Club B products and its own relevant catalogue.
shop.club-c.co.uk
Another distinct experience, powered by exactly the same Shopify backend.
The supplier doesn’t suddenly have 100 ecommerce platforms to administer.
Their team continues to manage products, inventory and orders centrally in Shopify.
The customer, meanwhile, gets an online shop that feels like it has been built specifically for their organisation.
We can vary the branding, imagery, content, navigation and available product range between storefronts without duplicating the underlying commerce infrastructure.
And where a store genuinely needs to be private, access can be authenticated rather than simply relying on hidden links or categories.
Why this gets particularly interesting
Once you’ve built the architecture, creating the next storefront becomes much more repeatable.
That opens up possibilities for:
- sports clubs;
- school uniform suppliers;
- franchise networks;
- corporate merchandise;
- membership organisations;
- trade customers;
- branded workwear;
- event merchandise;
- and suppliers serving large numbers of individual organisations.
You effectively have:
one Shopify operation, many customer-facing shops.
And when somebody is ready to buy, they can still complete the transaction using Shopify checkout.
Why we like keeping Shopify checkout
This is an important part of our headless approach.
We aren’t particularly interested in reinventing checkout.
It’s one of the reasons we like Shopify in the first place.
With the Storefront API, we can create and manipulate the customer’s cart inside our custom frontend and then use Shopify’s checkout URL when they’re ready to purchase. Shopify explicitly supports this flow in its Storefront API.
That means we can be incredibly inventive while helping someone decide what to buy, without becoming unnecessarily inventive when they actually want to pay for it.
Shopify has invested enormously in that part of the experience.
Its checkout supports accelerated purchasing through Shop Pay and a streamlined checkout flow, and Shopify says its checkout converts an average of 15% higher than competitors based on a comparative study it commissioned in 2023.
There are sensible reasons to take those claims with the usual commercial context, but the broader point stands:
checkout is critical ecommerce infrastructure.
We’d rather use a mature platform that continually invests in it than build a payment journey from scratch just because we can.
So there’s a principle running through most of these use cases:
Be as unconventional as you like while helping somebody decide what to buy. Be reassuringly conventional when you ask them to pay.
2. Run an ecommerce store and a product brochure from the same catalogue
Here’s another scenario.
You have a large range of products.
For one audience, you want a normal online shop:
View product → add to basket → checkout.
But another audience shouldn’t be able to buy online.
Perhaps:
- prices are negotiated;
- products are sold through distributors;
- you only supply approved customers;
- the sales process requires consultation;
- products are made to order;
- the audience is in a market where you don’t sell directly;
- or the second site is primarily intended for specifiers, architects or procurement teams.
Traditionally, businesses often end up maintaining two product databases.
There’s the ecommerce catalogue.
Then there’s a brochure website containing much of the same information.
Product descriptions change in one but not the other.
A photograph gets updated on the shop but remains outdated on the brochure.
A discontinued product disappears from one site and lives on indefinitely on another.
Headless gives us another option.
Use Shopify as the source of truth for both.
The first frontend behaves like an ecommerce store.
The second frontend consumes the same product information but simply doesn’t provide ecommerce functionality.
Instead of Add to basket, perhaps it has:
Add to enquiry.
Or:
Build a specification.
Or:
Save to wishlist.
Or:
Request a quote.
The customer might build up a list of ten products and submit it to a sales team rather than paying online.
From an internal perspective, you’re still managing the products once.
From the customer’s perspective, they’re two completely different websites built for two different jobs.
That’s one of the things we particularly like about headless architecture:
your database doesn’t have to dictate your interface.
3. Build a completely different way of buying your product
This might be our favourite use case.
Sometimes the conventional ecommerce experience isn’t actually the best way to sell something.
Imagine you’re selling a package containing six components.
A standard Shopify product page might ask the customer to work out which products they need, navigate around several pages and add everything to their basket individually.
But perhaps the best buying experience would be:
Step 1: Tell us what you’re trying to achieve.
Step 2: Choose your size.
Step 3: Choose your preferred configuration.
Step 4: Pick an optional accessory.
Step 5: Choose how frequently you need replacements.
Step 6: Here’s the package we’d recommend.
That can feel much more like using a purpose-built digital product than browsing an ecommerce catalogue.
Behind the scenes, though, those choices can be translated into the relevant Shopify products and variants and added to the customer’s cart.
Shopify’s Storefront API allows a custom application to create carts and add and update merchandise lines programmatically, which gives us considerable freedom over the experience that happens before checkout.
Depending on the product and integrations involved, that opens up possibilities such as:
- product configurators;
- guided selling;
- package builders;
- compatibility checkers;
- product recommendation tools;
- build-your-own bundles;
- quotation tools;
- subscription journeys;
- size or specification tools;
- and genuinely interactive product experiences.
A Shopify theme can certainly be customised to do sophisticated things.
The difference is that with a headless frontend we’re designing the application around the buying journey rather than trying to make that buying journey fit into a theme.
If you’ve only got a relatively small number of products but how you sell them is where you differentiate, this can be particularly powerful.
4. Give consumers and trade customers completely different experiences
B2B ecommerce is another good example of why one frontend doesn’t always fit every customer.
Imagine a manufacturer that sells both directly to consumers and to trade.
The consumer wants:
- great photography;
- product discovery;
- inspiration;
- reviews;
- recommendations;
- educational content;
- and an easy individual purchase.
A trade buyer might want almost the opposite.
They already know what SKU they need.
They want to log in, find 30 units of it, add another five products, confirm their pricing and place an order as quickly as possible.
So why give both customers essentially the same interface?
With a headless approach, you could have:
yourbrand.com
A highly visual consumer website designed around discovery and brand experience.
And:
trade.yourbrand.com
A purpose-built purchasing interface for professional customers.
The trade experience might include:
- authenticated access;
- rapid bulk ordering;
- customer-specific catalogues;
- volume quantities;
- repeat orders;
- trade information;
- account functionality;
- or completely different navigation.
Underneath, Shopify can still provide the central commerce infrastructure.
The interesting bit is that you stop thinking of your ecommerce website as the Shopify store.
Shopify is the engine.
You can build different interfaces on top of that engine for different jobs.
5. Create genuinely different storefronts for different countries
International ecommerce presents a similar challenge.
Often, “internationalisation” ends up meaning:
same website + translated words + different currency.
Sometimes that’s exactly what’s required.
But entering another market can involve considerably more than translation.
Your best-selling products might be different.
The way customers talk about the category could be different.
Your proposition might need to change.
Different photography could resonate.
One market might respond strongly to technical information while another responds to lifestyle content.
Different promotions might matter.
You could even have different navigation because customers categorise the products differently.
Shopify’s Storefront API supports localisation context including countries and languages, allowing custom storefronts to request the appropriate localised experience.
A headless architecture lets us take that further.
Rather than making every territory use exactly the same frontend, we can create experiences appropriate to individual markets while retaining central commerce infrastructure.
For example:
brand.co.uk
Designed around the UK business.
brand.fr
A French storefront that isn’t merely the UK site translated into French.
brand.com
A US-focused proposition.
That doesn’t mean every country needs a completely different website.
Quite the opposite.
A good component architecture means we can reuse the majority of the platform and only introduce differences where they provide genuine value.
It’s controlled variation, rather than maintaining multiple completely independent ecommerce websites.
One commerce engine. As many experiences as you need.
There’s a common theme running through all five of these examples.
Traditionally, an ecommerce platform and an ecommerce website have effectively been the same thing.
If you wanted another website, you often created another store.
If you wanted a substantially different experience, you customised the theme.
If you wanted something the theme wasn’t designed to do, the complexity started accumulating.
Headless architecture breaks that assumption.
Shopify can be your commerce infrastructure without being your website.
That means one Shopify implementation might eventually power:
- your main ecommerce store;
- 50 customer-specific stores;
- a trade portal;
- an international storefront;
- a catalogue-only website;
- and an experimental product configurator.
They don’t all need to look the same.
They don’t even need to behave the same.
What they can share is the expensive, difficult infrastructure underneath: products, inventory, pricing, carts, orders and checkout.
Why we’re particularly interested in this now
Headless commerce itself isn’t new.
Historically, however, building this kind of architecture could turn a relatively straightforward ecommerce project into a very substantial custom development programme.
That’s changing.
At Consider, we’ve been developing a reusable headless Shopify framework alongside an AI-supported development process that lets us create these custom frontends much more efficiently.
We’re not starting again every time we need to connect a product to Shopify or create a cart.
We’ve already solved the repeatable infrastructure problems.
That means more of the project can be spent on the part that should actually be bespoke:
What would make this particular buying experience better?
It’s why we’re increasingly interested in headless Shopify not just for large conventional ecommerce rebuilds, but for these slightly unusual use cases.
Sometimes you don’t need another ecommerce platform.
You need to use the ecommerce platform you already have more imaginatively.
And that’s where headless Shopify starts getting really interesting.
Ready to unlock the full potential of Headless Shopify?
If you’d like a chat to discover what type of ecommerce platform would help you elevate your online sales book a strategy call with our team today.
