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Why Content-Driven Stores and Marketplaces Need a Modular eCommerce and Headless CMS Integration

Oct 16, 2024 • 10 min

In ecommerce, content has evolved far beyond simple product descriptions and customer reviews. For many online stores and marketplaces, it’s now the backbone of the customer journey—driving engagement, trust, and ultimately, sales. Whether it’s detailed product guides, immersive videos, or shoppable editorials, content plays a crucial role in shaping the shopping experience and delivering value to customers at every touchpoint.

What does a content-driven ecommerce site look like?

The beauty of content-driven ecommerce sites is that they each take on a unique form, tailored to their industry and audience. But most share a few key components that elevate the customer experience and seamlessly blend content with commerce:

  1. Blog posts and editorials that are tightly integrated with product pages, or vice versa.
  2. Landing pages crafted for product launches, seasonal collections, or collaborations.
  3. Detailed product guides, specifications, and FAQs to aid decision-making.
  4. Videos, 360-degree product previews, AR/VR try-ons, and other immersive content to enhance product discovery.
  5. Personalized content, like recommendations and articles tailored to user behavior and preferences.
  6. User-generated content in the form of reviews, photos, or videos shared by customers.
  7. Shoppable social media posts that drive commerce directly from platforms like Instagram or Pinterest.
  8. Custom tools like product builders or cost calculators that add interactive value to the buying process. 

 

These elements are especially prominent in B2C stores, where emotional engagement plays a big role.

IKEA, for example, masterfully blends commerce with content, not just by showcasing products, but by presenting them in styled settings so customers can visualize how they’ll fit in their own homes. Take their holiday campaigns where they mix lifestyle photos, product guides, and even TikTok-inspired videos featuring IKEA’s designers.

Example of a content-driven B2B marketplace

Example of a content-driven B2B marketplace

In B2B ecommerce, content tends to be more fact-based and detail-oriented, focusing on product specifications, technical documentation, and other information buyers need to make informed decisions. While this content may not be as emotionally driven as B2C content, it plays a critical role in educating and guiding buyers through complex purchasing processes.

However, some B2B online stores are also starting to incorporate interactive content components to make complex data more digestible and engaging.

Shoppable content example in a B2C online store

Example of a content-driven B2B online store

Take Desktop Metal, a manufacturer of industrial 3D printers. They use visual storytelling to present their product capabilities in a way that goes beyond technical specs. Their pages combine technical guides, educational webinars, and rich visuals like high-quality images and videos to showcase the design and performance of their products. Although the content is function-driven, it’s delivered in an immersive, narrative-like format that not only informs but also engages the customer.

Integrating these content components into the commerce flow requires robust and flexible tools which aren’t easily available in traditional, monolithic ecommerce platforms with built-in CMS or headless CMS integration. How so? 

Why monolithic ecommerce platforms are a bad idea for content-driven stores (even with a headless CMS)

Until recently, traditional commerce solutions like Shopify, BigCommerce, or Adobe Commerce were the only choice if you wanted to start a digital commerce business. Basic and limited in flexibility, they weren't perfect but allowed you to build and launch a pretty decent online store pretty quickly.

When the headless wave came in, all of them introduced some sort of headless functionality, typically through APIs. Shopify launched the Storefront API, BigCommerce followed suit with its Open SaaS approach, Adobe Commerce (Magento) integrated GraphQL and REST APIs. Even Salesforce Commerce Cloud joined the trend, offering Commerce APIs to decouple frontends from their monolithic platform.

For some stores that don't require a lot of customization and flexibility in blending content and commerce, setups with an all-in-one commerce and content integration or an all-in-one platform with a headless CMS may work well. But if content is the centerpiece of your ecommerce strategy, such setups fall short for a number of reasons.

#1 Vendor lock-in and content vulnerability

In a monolithic, yet headless setup, the commerce platform and CMS are tightly connected. So, if you decide to migrate to a different CMS, it can turn into a full-scale, time-consuming replatforming project. Because each CMS works in a different way, you'll need to rebuild the logic behind how and where each piece of content is displayed from the ground up.

Even simple CMS updates can cause disruptions. Because everything published in the CMS is directly tied to the frontend, any update or glitch can mess up your content display. This means more dev work to fix affected pages. Now, imagine having hundreds of thousands of products in your catalog. Yeah, a nightmare.

#2 Basic content modeling and personalization

Personalization and content modeling are limited by the monolithic platform’s architecture. Showing different content based on user behavior or linking blog posts to products often needs custom coding or extra plugins. While some personalization is possible, you're stuck working with pre-set templates or dealing with more dev work.

#3 Scalability and performance issues

Even with the frontend separate, scaling the backend for content-heavy launches is highly inefficient. Imagine rolling out a new product line with a ton of extra pages, videos, and guides. Instead of just boosting the content side, you still have to scale the whole backend, including parts that have nothing to do with content. And, since the backend isn’t modular, adding server resources usually means scaling everything which translates into higher infrastructure costs and performance issues.

#4 Development and maintenance overhead

Finally, customizing and maintaining a traditional platform to meet the needs of a content-driven store can be resource-intensive. As more customizations are added for new content initiatives, the platform can become more complex and harder to maintain. Regular updates to the platform can disrupt customizations and require additional work to ensure compatibility, which can be a significant burden on development teams, and slow down marketing and commerce teams.

That's where modular commerce and headless content platforms duo comes to the rescue.

Why modular commerce and headless CMS stack is the way

Unlike monolithic commerce or content platforms where all functionality is tied together, a modular commerce and headless CMS setup separates both content and commerce management tools from the user interface and from each other. This means that you can choose best-of-breed software for each functional area that works best for your content-rich store.

Everywhere monolithic commerce platforms fail, modular commerce shines.

#1 Content and workflow autonomy

In a modular headless setup, all the content you create, edit, and publish in the CMS, along with its rendering logic, is stored within the ecommerce platform. This means that even if a CMS undergoes a major update or you switch to a new CMS, your content and its display across various commerce pages remain intact. This eliminates vendor lock-in and simplifies content management, leading to faster updates, less reliance on development resources, and noticeable cost savings over time.

#2 Advanced content personalization

A modular setup excels at managing complex, dynamic content. It allows marketers to create, organize, and deliver personalized content to specific user segments across multiple channels without requiring developer support. Content modeling, versioning, and dynamic content delivery are natively supported, which are crucial for stores that rely heavily on storytelling, educational content, or shoppable articles. And with deeper personalization comes increased customer engagement, higher conversion rates, higher AOV, and fewer abandoned carts.

#3 Scale without limits

A modular and headless setup lets you scale different parts of your backend separately. So, when your content or ecommerce needs grow, you can boost only what's necessary without affecting the rest of your system. This is a huge advantage for stores that rely on a lot of content, as they can expand their content capabilities without slowing down the shopping experience. It also helps keep server costs low and ensures your site stays fast and reliable during peak seasons.

#4 Low upkeep, fast development

A modular commerce setup with a headless CMS allows teams to work independently on the frontend and backend, reducing development bottlenecks. Content teams can manage and deploy content without depending on developers, while developers focus on improving backend performance or adding new functionalities. This reduces maintenance costs and allows for quicker iterations.

Content-driven stores powered by modular & headless stack

Let’s take a look at some content-driven ecommerce sites that are successfully running a headless CMS and modular commerce setup.

Takara Bio

Takara Bio USA is a biotech company, part of the Takara Bio Group, that develops, manufactures, and distributes a wide range of biotech products and services, including enzymes and reagents, contract research and manufacturing capabilities, nutraceuticals, and gene-based therapies under the Takara®, Cellartis®, and Clontech® brands.

Selling such complex, research-intensive products requires flexible and robust content management and commerce set-up. For example, the ThruPLEX DNA-Seq Kit product page includes not only a detailed description of the kit configuration, but also multiple content components such as user manuals, certificates of analysis, safety data sheets, preparation templates and more. The product page also includes add-on content such as DNA-seq protocols and relevant research papers for customers to read before purchasing.

Example of a content-driven B2B marketplace

Takara Bio USA moved to a modular commerce stack with Virto Commerce Innovation Platform and a headless CMS for complex content delivery

To support such complex content delivery for thousands of products, each requiring dozens of pieces of supplementary content, the Takara Bio USA commerce team moved to a modular commerce stack with Virto Commerce Innovation Platform and a headless CMS in 2018 as part of its digital transformation strategy.

The future of content-driven stores is headless and modular

While not all online stores and marketplaces may need a modular stack, especially those where content is not the primary purchase factor or driver, it's safe to say that where it is true, headless and modular commerce and CMS integration is not an afterthought, but a must if you want to succeed in the long term.

Virto's Commerce Innovation Platform and Builder.io’s Headless CMS are the perfect pair for content-driven stores and marketplaces looking to enhance customer experience, innovate, and create a flexible commerce ecosystem. The seamless API integration lets you manage, personalize, and connect content (like text, images, videos) to commerce data (such as stock, pricing, reviews, and shipping) with ease. Unlike other setups, Virto securely stores all the content and display logic, so even if the CMS is updated or changed, your content stays intact.

By using Virto Commerce's existing frontend design system as building blocks, development becomes faster and more efficient. Developers can easily register new Virto frontend components in code, allowing business teams to drag and drop these components to deliver faster updates and more engaging, content-rich experiences using Builder's Visual Editor, with less development effort.

Explore how the Virto Commerce and Builder.io combo transforms content-driven stores and marketplaces.

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