We held the virtual Headless Commerce Summit today with a variety of keynotes and live conversations about the future of e-commerce.

Check out the recordings from the Headless Commerce Summit!

The Future of Commerce is Headless

Chris Bach, president and co-founder of Netlify, and Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify, discuss why it's the time for headless and the modern commerce stack. We’re not talking about only improving e-commerce—we’re talking about revolutionizing it.

Headless Commerce on Shopify: Paul Valentine's Journey

Thomas Röser, team lead for e-commerce at Paul Valentine, and Alex O'Byrne, co-founder and director at We Make Websites, discuss the luxury brand’s journey to headless e-commerce. Thomas reflects on architecture decisions, considerations when migrating to a Jamstack approach, and some lessons learned along the way.

Beyond the Shopify Storefront: Headless Commerce Considerations

Kelly Vaughn, CEO and founder, The Taproom, shares insights.

With the arrival of Shopify’s GraphQL API, headless commerce opened up a new realm of possibilities for Shopify merchants. It’s the best of both worlds: you can take advantage of the stability, security, and well-built architecture of Shopify’s admin while modernizing the storefront build experience. In this talk you’ll learn about the architectural and technical decisions developers face when building a headless commerce storefront on top of Shopify: from tooling and languages to common Shopify-specific “gotchas” that may present some difficulties.

Jamstack Solutions for Performant A/B Testing and Personalization

Shalom Volchok, CEO and co-founder of Outsmartly, discusses client side A/B testing and personalization. He shares how by investing in your architecture, you can improve load times, which directly impact revenue.

Fireside Chat: Developer Experience for Headless Commerce

Cassidy Williams, engineer at Netlify, is joined by Mark Stewart, CTO of Fostr, and discusses the best way to work with Jamstack and headless commerce, referencing brands like Victoria Beckham Beauty. They dive into dev tooling considerations and other questions like, why are luxury fashion and lifestyle brands so quick to pick up Jamstack? Mark notes that the visual presentation and performance are the most important to these brands. Milliseconds can improve conversion and this directly impacts sales. The Q&A dives into a deeper discussion.

This fireside chat video will be added soon, so check back! In the meantime, check out the Victoria Beckham Beauty case study or webinar they discussed.

Scaling your eCommerce with Vue Storefront

Gift Egwuenu, frontend developer, Passionate People, discusses the key features of a Vue storefront. You can see it is platform agnostic (to connect as many backend e-commerce platforms as you like), has PWA support (with offline support and a mobile-friendly user experience), and it is open source. Dive in to see more details on the architecture, core concepts, customizability, how to get started, and see a demo.

Building a Stripe Powered Shopping Cart

Nick DeJesus, software engineer of Echobind, discusses the mental model to create, read, update, delete, and work with APIs like Stripe for your shopping cart and checkout. See how this Jamstack-friendly approach works. You’ll learn how having a solid foundation for your shopping cart gives you the flexibility to be creative with your checkout experiences.

ButcherBox’s Journey to Jamstack

Jeff Gnatek, head of engineering at ButcherBox, discusses how his team transitioned from a legacy web platform to a new engine that relied on separating the frontend and backend code. Their team did not need special servers, DevOps engineers or Kubernetes for this project. He discusses using a Jamstack architecture to separate parts of their site and build independently with Netlify, Contentful and Gatsby. Driven by page performance, they went from 4-7 seconds of load time, to under 1 second.

Build, Innovate, and Grow Multi-Region eCommerce with BigCommerce

Rachael Thompson, developer advocate at BigCommerce, discusses the headless architecture with a sample app, and how to extend apps to support multi-region storefronts with better localization and internationalization.

Poll stats from the event attendees

The Headless Commerce Summit event attracted more than 2,500 live attendees throughout the event. We took some quick polls with the audience, and found that of those that responded, in general:

• More than half of respondents (56%) have worked on e-commerce projects before, with more than a third (36%) starting out, and others brand new (8%).
• Of those considering moving to a headless commerce solution, the most popular motivator is that they are in pursuit of better performance (37%).
• Outstanding performance in the browser (30%), a distinct and efficient shopping experience (24%), and integration with existing in-house solutions (20%) were remarked as three important parts of their e-commerce projects.
• When asked about common challenges for e-commerce projects, respondents noted many of the following are concerns: estimating costs, creating the design, managing content and inventory, retaining developers with experience in the platform, and testing.

Thank you’s all around

Thank you to our speakers, host, Cassidy Williams, and Netlify team. And a very special thank you to our sponsors, Commerce Layer, Commerce.js, imgix, Outsmartly, Prismic, Shogun and Snipcart!

Are you migrating to a headless architecture or embarking on a new project? The experts at Netlify are here to help you make the right technical decisions. We can also connect you with our network of Netlify Agency Partners, who are ready to extend your team. Contact us to get started.