Today, Acquia announced a partnership with Elastic Path, a headless commerce platform. In this post, I want to explore the advantages of headless commerce and the opportunity it holds for both Drupal and Acquia.

The advantages of headless commerce

In a headless commerce approach, the front-end shopping experience is decoupled from the commerce business layer. Headless commerce platforms provide a clean separation between the front end and back end; the shopping experience is provided by Drupal and the commerce business logic is provided by the commerce platform. This decoupling provides advantages for the developer, merchant and shopping experience.

• For developers, it means that you can decouple both the development and the architecture. This allows you to build an innovative shopping experience without having to worry about impacting a system as critical as your commerce backend. For instance, you can add ratings and reviews to your shopping experience without having to redeploy your commerce platform.
• For merchants, it can provide a better experience for administering the shop. Traditional commerce solution usually ship with a lightweight content management system. This means that there can be competition over which system provides the experience layer (i.e. the "glass"). This can introduce overlap in functionality; both systems offer ways to manage URLs, create landing pages, manage user access rights, etc. Because headless commerce systems are designed from the ground up to integrate with other systems, there is less duplication of functionality. This provides a streamlined experience for merchants.
• And last but not least, there is the shopping experience for end-users or consumers. Simply put, consumers are demanding better experiences when they shop online. They want editorials, lookbooks, tutorials, product demonstration videos, testimonials, and more. They want the content-rich experiences that a comprehensive content management system can provide.

All this is why Acquia is excited about our partnership with Elastic Path. I believe the partnership is a win-win-win. It's a win for Acquia because we are now better equipped than ever to offer personal, unique and delightful shopping experiences. It is a win for Elastic Path as they have the opportunity to provide contextual commerce solutions to any Acquia customer. Last but not least, it's a win for Drupal because it will introduce more organizations to the project.

Note that many of the above integration challenges don't apply to native solutions like Drupal Commerce for Drupal or WooCommerce for WordPress. It only applies when you have to integrate two entirely different systems. Integrating two different systems is a common use case, because customers either already have a commerce platforms in place that they don't want to replace, or because native solutions don't meet their needs.

Acquia's commitment to best of breed

Acquia remains committed to a best-of-breed strategy for commerce. There isn't a single commerce platform that meets the needs of all our customers. This belief comes from years of experience in the field. Acquia's customers want to integrate with a variety of commerce systems such as Elastic Path, SAP Hybris, Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware), Magento, BigCommerce, Reaction Commerce, Oracle ATG, Moltin, and more. Our customers also want to use Drupal Commerce, Drupal's native commerce solution. We believe customers should be able to integrate Drupal with their commerce management solutions of choice.