Tech Conversations With Alexa- Headless E-commerce

Sandesh -“Alexa, add 2 liters of milk to my list and place order”

Alexa- "your order is placed and it will be delivered to you by evening."

Sandesh - "You are awesome!!"

Alexa - "Tell me something which I don't know !"

Sandesh -"You know BLA BLA. I wonder how you are placing orders just using voice, you must be having mojo head to house such a huge brain 😀 "

Alexa - "Funny !! in fact this is possible because of headless."

Sandesh - "Headless 🤔 "

Alexa - "Yes. Headless. don't tell me you never heard this term 🙄"

Sandesh - "I swear, never. It sounds weird but interesting😳"

Alexa - "Yes it is. Thanks to the advances in the digital landscape, we have Omnichannel touchpoints such as mobile apps, smartwatches, voice-enabled devices, IoT devices.

Now e-commerce is not limited to websites only"

Sandesh - "Stop beating around the bush and tell me what exactly this headless is?"

Alexa- "My bad, developers will only understand technical language :)

Traditional architectures, though robust, have high cost when it comes to performance, maintenance, and rigidity to support multi-channel touchpoints.

The front end ( presentation layer) is dependent and tightly coupled to the backend and any change on the presentation layer or any customization of structure, templates, impacts the complete system, including the database.

On the other hand, headless separate the application into different layers eg application layer, presentation layers, and then these loosely coupled elements come together, almost like working with digital LEGO.

Headless allows the whole system to develop independently and at a different pace. The two sides of the system communicate via API, so they remain separate entities while the data flow is undisturbed"

Sandesh - "wait!! this all sounds familiar .. Aren't these are benefits of Microservices over monolith application ?"

Alexa - "yes, it is ."

Sandesh - "Do you mean headless is nothing but stateless microservices communicating with each other or with the multiple presentation layers independently using APIs"

Alexa - "Exactly !!"

Sandesh - "Then why don't you call it Microservice architecture? why such hippie buzz name Headless architecture😡 "

Alexa -"you got me, this even I don't know 😜😜"