What Is Headless Commerce?

"Headless" describes a system with its presentation layer taken off. According to a Forrester analyst writing in 2019, and according to commercetools itself, the term was put forward in 2013 by Dirk Hoerig, co-founder of commercetools. The same Forrester post says a 2013 Forrester report had recommended keeping the content system "loosely coupled" to the commerce system. On the pages of sphere.io, the original name of the commercetools product, as archived by the Internet Archive in April 2013, the word does not appear, so the attribution rests on those two sources.

A commerce engine stores products, prices, stock and orders and exposes them through APIs, for example REST or GraphQL. The frontend, whether a website, an app or another channel, requests that data and builds the pages. Shopify puts it this way: "You build the frontend, and Shopify's APIs handle the commerce underneath." According to Shopify, this lets a merchant sell on a website, in an app, in a game, in a livestream or through a buy button on another site. BigCommerce notes that a single operation on a headless storefront, such as taking a payment, can take several API calls.

Alongside the engine there is often a headless CMS for text and images. The split is about what each one manages: the headless CMS handles content, the commerce engine handles products, prices and orders.

Source: Shopify, "About headless commerce"; BigCommerce, "Introduction to Headless Commerce" (accessed 12.11.2026).

Some vendors use the word composable for similar ideas. Shopware, for example, describes its Composable Frontends as a toolkit for building platform-agnostic custom storefronts.

On 29 June 2021, Shopify previewed Hydrogen, then a React framework for custom storefronts, and Oxygen, a way to host those storefronts on Shopify. In version 2026-10, Hydrogen is described as Shopify's headless toolkit and works with frameworks such as Next.js, React Router, Nuxt, Astro and SvelteKit; Oxygen runs the storefront as a Web Worker, and Hydrogen storefronts can also be hosted elsewhere, such as on Vercel. Shopware's Frontends connect to the shop through its Store API, with a demo store built on Vue.js and Nuxt.

What matters in a headless shop is what Google receives. The URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console shows a screenshot of the rendered page, the resources that loaded and the code the JavaScript produced. A curl request to a product page tells you whether the server's HTML already contains the name, price and description, or whether they only arrive later through JavaScript.

The advantage is freedom: any technology for the frontend, one catalogue for several channels, and the option to connect a CRM, an ERP or a PIM to either side.

Shopify itself admits the cost: "A headless storefront costs more to build and run than a theme." The merchant has to accept the added cost and complexity and have developers to maintain the storefront after launch. Shopify suggests going headless only when the business cannot get what it needs from its sales channels, themes and apps.

For SEO, headless is neither better nor worse in itself. It depends on how it is built:

• Rendering. Google queues every page with a 200 status code for rendering, and it recommends server-side rendering or pre-rendering because not all bots can run JavaScript. A frontend that builds product pages only in the browser (client-side rendering) instead of using server-side rendering depends on that second step.
• Status codes. In a single-page app, a URL that does not exist can return 200 and become a soft 404. Google describes how to avoid it. Hydrogen, for its part, checks the shop's URL redirects before it serves a 404.
• Resources. Google warns against blocking scripts in robots.txt when it cannot understand the page without them.
• Filters. Faceted navigation produces large numbers of URLs; Google recommends preventing them from being crawled if they don't need to be in the index.
• Product structured data, which the frontend has to generate from the API.

How we handled it ourselves with a headless CMS and Astro is described in our article on headless CMS and SEO.

A headless CMS separates content from presentation; headless commerce does the same with the commerce logic. A shop can use both at once. E-commerce is the general idea of selling online; headless only describes how the shop is built.

Source: each vendor's documentation (accessed 12.11.2026). Alphabetical order, no ranking.

The figures vendors publish on the sales or speed of headless shops don't explain their method, and this entry leaves them out. There is no standard definition either: each vendor describes headless from the angle of its own product.

• Check whether your current platform, with its themes and apps, already covers what you need.
• Make sure you have a development team for the frontend after launch, not only for the build.
• Choose a frontend that delivers server-rendered HTML for category and product pages.
• Plan redirects for the old URLs before you switch.
• Generate product structured data from the API.
• Use Search Console to check the rendered HTML of a category page and a product page.

• Return a real 404 for products that no longer exist, not an empty page with a 200.
• Leave the scripts and stylesheets Googlebot needs for rendering accessible.

• Going headless without an in-house team to maintain the frontend.
• Launching a frontend that only paints the content in the browser.
• Forgetting the redirects from the old shop.

This entry was written in November 2026 with AI assistance. The facts come from documentation by Shopify, BigCommerce, Shopware, Adobe Commerce, VTEX and commercetools, a Forrester blog post, Google's documentation and the Internet Archive. It was reviewed before publication and contains no client data.