What is Headless?

Headless commerce is an e-commerce solution where the front-end (head) has been decoupled from the back-end commerce functionality. It provides your online store with more flexibility to create unique experience for your visitors with endless possibilities for customization.

Omnichannel readiness

The content created in a headless system like Unchained is “pure” and can be repurposed across multiple channels (incl. website, mobile app, digital assistant, virtual reality, smart watches etc.) anywhere and at any time through the customer journey.

Low operating costs

Headless software is usually cheaper to install and run than its monolith counterparts, especially as it is typically built on a cloud model where multi-tenant options keep the running costs low. All parts of the system come with docker images per default.

Reduces time to market

Unchained promotes an agile way of working because content creators and developers can work simultaneously in completely separated modules. And with the help of GraphQL, building front- and back-end in parallel is also doable. That way projects can be finished much faster.

Easy to use

Traditional digital commerce systems tend to be cumbersome and complex as vendors attempt to offer every available feature in one box and force you to read "how to theme X?" documentation. Headless systems focus on content management; keeping things simple for those who use it on a daily basis. The entire user experience can usually be managed from within one back-end.

Flexibility

Content editors can work in any headless CMS they like and developers can build any kind of front-end they want in their preferred language (e.g. Ruby, PHP, Java, or Swift) and then simply integrate the two via APIs (Unchained & CMS) with GraphQL. This allows for polyglot programming where multiple programming paradigms can be used to deliver content to multiple channels, and enables a company to benefit from the latest developments in language frameworks, promoting a microservices architecture.

Cloud Scalability

The content purity and stateless APIs of headless CMSs enable high scalability, especially as the architecture fully leverages the elasticity of a cloud platform. Unchained uses a NoSQL database to do auto-sharding and is able to store all assets in a block storage.

System Security

Since the content is typically provided through a high-performance content delivery network (rather than directly from the database) and can be cached at different edges of the microservice architecture, the risk of distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDOS) is reduced.