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How to eliminate data integration challenges with headless integration

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How to eliminate data integration challenges with headless integration

The customer experience you provide has probably become your key differentiator. To continue to meet your customers’ ever-changing demands, your underlying technology platforms and business systems must provide incredible agility. Headless integration promises the freedom to create exceptional customer experiences driven by continuous innovation at scale and speed. Within a headless architecture, you can take your customer insights and use them to drive a decoupled front-end that will never be constrained by your back-end systems. This gives you the ability to choose the technology stack that best suits your needs and allows for greater flexibility in data integration.

Successful adoption of new commerce technologies has become crucial for companies struggling with a fragmented digital commerce environment. By leveraging the power of centralized data to personalize interactions and enable consistency, brands can create seamless experiences across multiple touchpoints. Therefore, going headless is a trend not only in content management and experience management but also in product information management. Ultimately, to ensure minimal tech disruptions while maximizing ROI, a headless solution is the best way to get a head start on the competition.

But how can brands keep up with the new integrations without disrupting critical day-to-day operations or creating data silos? This is where a traditional approach, where the front-end and back-end are tightly coupled, must be replaced by a headless approach.

Headless architecture — The new normal

To enable digital agility, companies are increasingly turning to headless architecture. Headless allows teams to independently build back-end and front-end, ensuring minimal impact on each part and setting a smoother development workflow. In fact, 77% of companies with headless architecture agree it gives them increased agility. To deliver consistent product information, it’s crucial to move away from monolithic software and create an integrated sales and marketing IT ecosystem. For instance, by integrating a Product Information Management (PIM) system with an ERP system, brands can ensure a seamless flow of SKU data and easily track inventory in one central location. The goal is to decouple separate applications while allowing data to flow freely between all components.

Organizations that are optimizing experiences across multiple devices should consider headless integration. Unfortunately, many brands are still limited by siloed technology which makes it difficult to share data across systems and deliver a cohesive, flexible brand experience. Airtable and Forrester’s Crisis of a Fractured Organization survey revealed that large organizations use an average of 367 different software tools, creating data silos and disrupting processes between teams. Integrating this technology, however, can open many doors. But deciding which strategy is right for any business means understanding the complexity of the systems that need to be integrated.

What is headless integration?

With growing customer expectations and the development of IoT and connected devices, the need for effective multichannel content publishing has been steadily rising. Seamless customer experiences across channels are now a top priority for consumers (42%), which means brands should streamline data integration to provide contextualized experiences. With headless integration, businesses can manage and distribute product data effectively from a single source while ensuring a seamless experience across all customer touchpoints.

Choosing the right setup can make all the difference when it comes to reaching your customers without any friction. Decoupled and headless content management systems provide the desired scalability and quick integration with multiple customer-facing and internal operational platforms. A headless approach allows you to manage the endless number of interaction channels by enabling a quick introduction of new customer touchpoints/front-end channels, powered by the same set of APIs — ensuring data consistency.

With headless integration, you can build a centralized repository of reusable services within your organization. Leverage your system architecture to provide quick and secured access to your product data, so you can create and manage more content and make it available across all your touchpoints. A headless approach to Product Information Management (PIM) allows businesses to choose and integrate different front-end technologies or frameworks based on their specific requirements. This flexibility enables the fast adoption of new technologies, the ability to experiment with different user experiences, and the scalability to handle increased traffic or new touchpoints without impacting the back-end data management.

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What are the challenges of headless integration?

If you want to provide a true omnichannel experience, then headless integration is a must for your company. It allows you to effectively analyze your data and seamlessly deliver it to users across multiple customer touchpoints. Yet, going headless is not without its challenges. Here are a few:

  1. Ensuring the required level of security
    As the front-end and back-end are separate, there is potential for security vulnerabilities if the API is not well secured. Data exchange between different systems must be carried out in compliance with the security standards required by the type of data processed (e.g., user information, payment information). This means developers must spend extra time deploying security updates based on business needs.

  2. Integration with legacy systems
    Bring products to life with interesting descriptions. According to Harvard Business School, 95% of purchasing decisions are made by the subconscious mind, and the best way to reach this part of the human brain is to tell compelling stories. An item such as a coat, for example, is just a coat in a product catalog without background information. That is why providing context is essential.

  3. Overcoming technical complexity
    Another challenge of a decoupled architecture is its technical complexity. With a monolithic approach, the front-end and back-end are tightly integrated, which can make development and deployment easier. However, with headless architecture, the front-end and back-end are separate, communicating through APIs. This means that developers must ensure that the APIs are operating correctly and that the front-end and back-end are working seamlessly. In addition, developers may need to master several programming languages and technologies to work with the different layers of the architecture.

What are the advantages of headless integration?

Headless architectures provide more flexibility in data integration, ensuring easy adaptations and transitions for future changes. Going headless has numerous benefits — from scalability to lower operating costs. Here are a few advantages:

  1. Increased scalability
    The headless approach is fully customizable, which makes it perfect for companies looking to scale up. According to Salesforce, companies with headless architecture are more likely to be rapidly expanding into new channels (77%) than non-headless companies (54%). With a decoupled architecture, each component can be scaled independently. For instance, if you need to handle a surge in traffic on the front-end system, you can scale up the front-end servers without worrying about scaling up the back-end servers. This can lead to significant cost savings since you only need to scale the underload components.

  2. Enhanced omnichannel experience
    With 90% of customers expecting their interactions to be consistent across all channels, one of the most powerful headless features is the delivery of omnichannel experiences. Headless integration helps distribute the content across various platforms, keeping the back-end system constant for all. With content becoming more wide-ranging, including more formats and channels, dealing with localized content needs to get smarter. A headless approach can help streamline localization and personalization by using a single back-end engine while delivering localized content through custom front-end UIs.

  3. Faster time-to-market
    In addition to supporting diversity in frameworks and languages, a headless approach enables agile workflows. 68% of companies report that it takes three months or more to bring new commerce solutions to market. An API-driven architecture helps businesses remain adaptable given the rapid pace of technological change. Organizations can change their user interface without affecting the back-end system. Therefore, they can quickly respond to market changes and customer demands, launching new features, or interfaces in less time. Also, they can replace or upgrade various aspects of their existing infrastructure that don’t work for them.

  4. Improved customer experience
    Headless architecture gives organizations the freedom to build according to the needs of their unique customer base, rather than attempting to customize an existing product, which can be costly and time-consuming. In fact, 76% of companies agree that headless commerce allows for the ability to customize digital experiences. The front-end can be developed independently of the back-end, giving companies more control over how the content is displayed. This approach also enables easy updates and maintenance, which means companies can frequently upgrade their websites and applications without disrupting the customer experience. Businesses can be more responsive to their customers, whatever their individual needs may be.

  5. Enhanced data integration
    Attracting and retaining customers requires seamless and comprehensive integration of product data. This entails using a data-driven approach that combines analytics, automation, and digital tools. Storing information in different tools creates silos, encourages multiple sources of truth, and makes it harder for teams to find the information they need. A monolithic architecture is not equipped with the right tools to achieve data integration. In contrast, going headless allows you to integrate data from existing data sources into a PIM system. A headless PIM helps manage and update product information in a centralized hub with complete accuracy, enabling information to flow seamlessly to all intended channels.

Headless integration powered by Contentserv's Product Experience Hub

Imagine a world where you have instant access to all data, can handpick the assets you need, and deliver a new digital experience with just a few clicks. Where you are no longer limited by the constraints of a monolithic architecture and can create product experiences tailored to your customers. This world is possible with Contentserv’s Product Experience Hub (PXHub). Contentserv’s cloud-first, API-centric approach allows you to connect your PIM with both new and existing systems. No matter your needs, from DAM, ecommerce, print, and more, PXHub will fit smoothly into your existing ecosystem and future-proof your business thanks to our vast network and exclusively built PIM integrations.

Product Experience Hub automatically syncs with your Contentserv solution and other business applications, providing access to your data with pre-aggregation and a powerful engine. It offers an easy interface to your products with powerful APIs, Exports, Imports, marketplace integrations, and more. Gain more flexibility and opportunities to evolve the customer experience with the freedom of a front-end framework. By easily customizing your front-end solutions, you can create a more personal and consistent experience to meet your customers’ needs.

PXHub offers you distinctive features that accurately offer data integration in headless architecture:

  • Channel-optimized APIs
    Configure all data your channel requires via the user interface, including multiple languages and related objects in unlimited levels.

  • Speed-up integrations
    Use a central API instead of building a specific export for every channel and therefore lower the complexity of the integration.

  • Automatic API documentation
    Automatically generate the latest schema documentation for your APIs.

  • Channel specific delta detection
    Request a delta to any previous call. Delta is detected on the defined API schema definition and therefore in the specific channel.

  • Pull & push
    Both Integration modes are supported. Consumer system can read data through APIs but also push scenarios can be configured by defining flows.

  • Data synchronization
    Near real-time data sync with a read-optimized data model for great performance and up-to-date data available for APIs.

How Varo benefits from the Product Experience Hub

With headless integration, companies can overcome data integration challenges while delivering contextualized customer experiences. Varo’s success story is an example of how Product Experience Hub can help companies centrally manage the integration of external systems into a company’s central marketing processes.

The leading European distributor of power tools, garden equipment, hand tools, and accessories employs PXHub, both internally and externally, to effortlessly manage and implement integrations, simplify dynamic content, easily export data, and sync data in real time. With PXHub’s flexible configuration and user-friendly interface, Varo was able to create the necessary endpoints to provide all systems with high-quality data. Overall, the company raised its accuracy and completeness of product information to 85%, compared to 10% before implementing PIM.

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Future-proof your business with headless integration

With headless integration, organizations can unlock the full potential of their data, provide personalized and consistent experiences, and future-proof their business in an ever-changing digital landscape. Integrated data unlocks a layer of connectivity that businesses need if they want to compete in today’s economy. By connecting systems that contain valuable data and integrating them across departments and locations, you’ll be able to achieve data continuity, drive customer engagement and loyalty, and ultimately achieve sustained growth.

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