Five Reasons Why a Headless Ecommerce Platform Needs to be Blazing Fast

I recently joined a discussion on headless ecommerce and API design. It was very clear that not everyone gives performance the attention it deserves. Statements like “it is fast enough” should not be accepted. You should always be millisecond hunting. Customers, sales, SEO and the environments benefit. Here are the top five reasons why a headless ecommerce platform needs to be lightening fast.

This is the number one point for making ecommerce API a high priority. When building out headless commerce shopping experience the frontend is basically hitting the API continuously. When measuring frontend performance you are only as fast as your API can deliver your data.

It is proven that a snappier user interface gives a better user experience. Research done by Jacob Nielsen recommends to stay under 0.1 seconds for any response from the UI. Any slower and the user feels the lag. In order to achieve this in a headless ecommerce scenario you need a lightning fast ecommerce API. There is no way around this. Respect your customers and deliver a fast shopping experience.

The headline says it all. About 10 years ago Amazon published the remarkable statistics that for every 100ms of latency on their website it cost them 1% in sales. Turned around they increased sales with 1% for every 100ms they shaved off their ecommerce latency. That is kind of a good incentive to be fast.

A more recent example is MyRevolution which moved from Magento to Crystallize and saw a 72% increase in conversion. This was mainly due to Magento performance optimization being super hard as that ecommerce platform is not designed for high performance. Your ecommerce platform of choice should be designed for performance.

Do not underestimate the developer experience. If you have a stack that results in a slow and painful API for developers to work with you will lose them. When having a fast and easy to use API developers will love it. Be more efficient and build better ecommerce software.

If you are selling stuff online you need to be found. SEO is strategically important to you. Google gives a penalty to websites that are slow so you need to have a fast frontend performance. For this reason frontend performance is one of the most important points on the ecommerce SEO checklist.

According to the World Economic Forum the forecast for 2020 is that computing power represents 2.7% of all greenhouse gasses. In context this is about double the total annual greenhouse gas output as Canada.

Make sure your APIs are fast and nimble and they require less computing power. Being able to scale with less computing power does not only save you money on computing power it contributes to less greenhouse gasses. Good for you. Good for the planet.