Amplience is a leading commerce experience platform with a reputation for creating powerful customer experiences for some of the most innovative brands on earth — Traeger, Mulberry, and Crate&Barrel to name a few.
What do a grill brand, a fashion retailer, and home decor and furniture have in common? They all want the freedom to do more with customer experience.
John Williams, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Amplience, joined Bold Co-Founder Jay Myers on a recent episode of the Own Your Commerce podcast to talk about why more brands and retailers are moving away from monolithic platforms and embracing the MACH ecosystem:
M: Microservices based
A: API-first
C: Cloud-native SaaS
H: Headless
Check out the full episode or keep reading for some insightful audio clips and key takeaways.
But Williams didn’t come on the show to confuse listeners with the latest ecommerce jargon. The goal is to demystify ideas like headless commerce for brands in order to enable them to provide the latest-and-greatest in customer experience.
Amplience initially got into headless commerce out of a B2B consumer need. Brands were coming to them wanting to get more out of their ecommerce platforms, and they were happy to help.
Headless commerce is about more than just about satisfying the needs of the present. Brands are all looking to secure their digital presence for future optionality, anticipating the needs of their customers today and tomorrow. For Williams it’s about enabling the speed to keep up with consumer demand:
“The way ecommerce retail is going, there’s much more expectation on the experience of the ecommerce journey than there was before…With the rise of social media, especially since Covid, people are using more channels to get into those experiences, and they’re hitting the product details page far more than ever before. So what do you do? You have to have a system that you can rapidly change and redevelop and manipulate these different experiences as things change. If you’ve got this old kind of monolithic thing all fused together, it’s really, really hard to move fast.”
Composable commerce
As brands look to increase speed-to-market in response to rapidly-changing customer needs, the move to a modular or composable commerce platform may be the logical solution. Composable commerce refers to brands and their development teams to compose their commerce platform of best-in-breed technology partners by switching out, upgrading, or adding modules and microservices individually, without having to manage multiple dependencies across the system.
Learn how Staples Canada used a composable commerce solution to save time and money.
By building the backend of a headless commerce platform, businesses are free to move away from a rigid monolithic platform and to create a fully customized platform. This approach provides a way for businesses to futureproof their digital platforms by using APIs to connect and scale features in the form of microservices. Retailers can respond to the changing ecommerce environment by adding functionality and customer services as needed.
Williams said the composable approach speaks to there being a much richer variety of choices in the market. Brands today have the freedom to pick and choose their dream team of technology partners to build their ideal commerce solution.
But are brands really embracing the shift? For Williams and Amplience, it comes down to being able to empower brands to offer customers the best experience possible. Not just digitally, on a as in on their site or mobile, but in terms of offering a full multi-channel experience.
Let’s look at a popular brand Amplience has helped in bringing their customer experience to the next level.
Traeger
Traeger sells luxury wood pellet grills, offering customers the flavour and experience of a real wood smoker with the convenience of a backyard grill. But what they deliver goes far beyond the grill. Buying a Traeger grill means entering a close-knit community of grillers and enthusiasts (The Traegerhood), and gaining access to a ton of useful content like recipes, guides and videos, along with the integration of digital technology built right into their grills.
Williams on Traeger: “What I love about it is that when people talk about IoT, and they’re looking for examples of it, we’re actually pushing content and data right into the grills. And I think that’s really cool because it’s actually something that’s not just a gimmick, it’s actually really, really useful. And it’s quite cool. And I want to have one of my own so I can play around with it myself.”
Traegor chose a headless architecture for their relaunched digital experience.
By powering their entire site and digital experience, Amplience played an instrumental role in helping the world’s top selling wood-fired grill creators create meaningful digital experiences for their tight-knit community.
“What I’m really excited about is that we are evolving away from the old world of headless CMS into really driving the experience — and the fact that ecommerce is becoming much more experiential than it ever was before.” – John Williams
This was just an appetizer considering all of the key takeaways shared in the full interview. Hungry for more on headless? Listen to the entire episode here:
Be sure to stop by the Own Your Commerce home page and subscribe for more free episodes on the latest ecommerce trends and insights. Have a question about headless commerce or anything else? Leave a comment below and we’ll be happy to keep the conversation going.
