The Content Management System (CMS) has picked up the pace. With the advent of low code and no-code solutions, powered with cloud computing, creating a website or even an e-commerce store is so simple and straightforward. Especially when it comes to startups who want something quick as a cost-effective solution – they often go for CMS.
The great thing about CMS is that it requires few tech skills. However, when your business starts to grow, you’ll find you need to get more techie people involved to come up with robust solutions which satisfy your business needs. If you ask my honest opinion as a programmer, I always prefer custom coded or hardcoded solutions. This is because the customisation that can be achieved with hardcoded solutions is way better than with CMS. However, hard-coded solutions are more costly than CMS.
On the other hand, the complexity with CMS increases as your business grows or the business operations become more complex.
Considering the cost-effectiveness and complexity, what if we can have the best of CMS and hardcoded solutions? This is what Headless CMS is. The term ‘Headless’ means the front-end of your website is decoupled from your CMS.
Unlike traditional CMS, in Headless CMS your website's front-end and back-end are decoupled. Your back-end can be in any CMS of your choice and your front-end can be in any coding language/framework of your choice. Now, if these are decoupled then how do they communicate? Well, the answer is, by using an API. These APIs could be REST or GRAPH QL APIs. So, you don’t have to rewrite your back-end logic – you can just reuse it over APIs. Not only that, but you can also have a mobile app using your APIs.
Because you see, every website or even a mobile app is just an input and output (display) system of data. So, you can create your data with CMS where you can make the most of the UI-based system provided by the CMS provider. And then you can render that data on your web app/website using a JavaScript framework, like Next, Vue, Nuxt, etc. or any web framework in the language of your choice. You are not just limited to the rendering of data. You can also take it a step forward by customising your website logic accordingly.
Now when it comes to e-commerce systems, things might get complex especially if you are having a multi-vendor system. That’s the main problem we are trying to solve with our Garchi SaaS Headless CMS E-Commerce API solution. We have created a solution where you can use the provided dashboard to manage your products, orders, sellers, coupons and customers. Then simply use our secure APIs to build your Headless e-Commerce website. It is a cost-effective solution where you can try it for free and, as your business grows, you can upgrade to the plan of your choice. Pretty cool, right?