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Spotted: Headless commerce is an e-commerce system where the front end of an online store (the part with the interface with which customers interact) is separated from the back end (the behind-the-scenes functions that facilitate sales). What’s the point? Decoupling the two creates a faster, more agile, and consistent shopping experience and improves the ability to customise the front end. Now, startup Shopistry is using headless commerce to enable businesses to scale and customise their online services more easily. 

Shopistry was founded in 2019 by Jaafer Haidar and Tariq Zabian, who had experience in e-commerce and cloud software venture capital. The pair believe that headless, which they prefer to call “modular”, will become the dominant e-commerce architecture in the next five years. They are not the only ones to think this. The company has recently raised €1.7 million in seed funding from investors, including Shoptalk founder Jonathan Weiner, Hatch Labs’ Amar Varma, Garage Capital, Mantella Venture Partners and Raiven Capital, to further develop their products.  

The company currently offers five products to retail brands. These include Shopistry Console, which provides a back-end platform that businesses can adapt at any time, as well as support for e-commerce tools like Shopify or Square, analytics and payment providers; Shopistry Cloud, which manages infrastructure and data across services; Shopistry Storefront and Mobile for managing web storefronts and mobile apps; customer management system Shopistry CMS; and design and engineering assistance through Shopistry Services.

Haider recently explained to TechCrunch that, “It’s a modular system, we call it ‘headless without the headaches,’ where you grab the framework to manage APIs. After a company goes live, they can spend 50 per cent of their budget just to keep the lights on. They use marketplaces like Shopify to do the tech, and we are doing the same thing, but providing way more optionality. We are not a monolithic system.” 

Gone are the days when a brand had to have its own in-house technology team. Now, there are a huge number of platforms and services that help even small brands provide a top-end e-commerce experience. From platforms like Pinduoduo and Squadded, which allow shoppers to band together for discounts, to shopping platforms that encourage social responsibility, the e-commerce landscape is changing rapidly. 

Written By: Lisa Magloff

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