Headless WooCommerce

Have you been wondering how to scale WooCommerce in order to reach your high sales goals? Don’t worry, we’ll tell you how. 

In today’s market, it’s important to not only do something that the end consumers see value in but also to build a strong brand. Porter’s basic rule about marketing strategies applies to everyone. Brands that can differentiate themselves and stand out while simultaneously build relationships with their customers do better in a world where it is very easy to just order cheap pirated copies from low-wage countries.

Most people who start working with WooCommerce do so as early entrepreneurs who want to realize an idea and use the power of WordPress and WooCommerce to differentiate themselves. The strength of WordPress and WooCommerce is that it democratizes the tools of production, as Chris Anderson would describe it when he described the upcoming market on the Internet and its “Long–tail“. Nowadays, people use WooCommerce to sell everything from funeral services and phone cases to electric guitars.

When your E-commerce starts to grow, you will eventually need to let go of some of the control and let others who have specialized in the field help, rather than doing everything yourself. By focusing on your business, you can be more efficient with investing in what really matters – the core product you provide to your customers and the marketing. To get where you want to go, however, it is important to realize that you do not just need good E-commerce – you need serious IT support in the form of, for example, ERP systems for WooCommerce, to continue to deliver and upscale.

What is headless E-commerce?

Headless E-commerce is a concept that basically involves separating the business-critical software from the software that drives the E-commerce. The business system takes care of all the complicated pieces behind the scenes to then feed simple answers to the E-commerce side of things. The answer is usually not “42”; rather, it will tell you from which of the four international warehouses a specific item should be shipped to streamline the shipping. The business system ensures that everyone involved in the organization gets the information they need, and as an owner, you can sit and watch when all parts of the machinery do precisely as intended. Nothing feels as satisfying as when everything just works, right?

Having this approach between the systems means that you can have different development rates in the different systems. In the business-critical systems, you need to be very, very careful because if something there breaks down or goes wrong, you will get big problems and angry customers. In E-commerce, however, you need to be able to operate fast and cost-effectively to create value for your end customers and thus be able to stay one step ahead of your competitors.

A business system combined with WordPress and WooCommerce will provide you with this kind of a layout. The advantage of this is that you can also own all parts of the system and get total control as business systems can be operated with any operating partner or within your own IT infrastructure. It is also of course possible to rent a SaaS solution such as Centra or Storm, with all the pros and cons this entails.

Headless WooCommerce with Sage X3

By turning their E-commerce with WooCommerce into a Headless WooCommerce, you can achieve this vision in a very cost-effective way. We have good experience working with a couple of different business systems to achieve this setup, some of course work better than others. One of the ones we are happy to recommend and for which we also have ready-made solutions is Sage X3 (Sage Business Cloud Enterprise Management).

With this solution, order management, product data, individual price lists, stock management, stock status, etc. are managed through Sage. WordPress / WooCommerce is then transformed into a marketing platform where you can quickly build and test new functions and publish content.

Case: Sage X3 for Strandberg Guitars

Strandberg Guitars has a strong brand among people who love guitars. When we started working together, they had more than 100,000 customer contacts who voluntarily said they wanted news and updates on products. Despite this, Strandberg had a problem. The majority of their sales went through one or sometimes several resellers who pushed down margins significantly. But at the same time, it was convenient: They received larger orders for products through their retailers. The question was, how would you manage huge amounts of orders without drowning in administration?

They decided to invest in digitizing their business processes and building an E-commerce in order to access their followers around the world who already loved their products.

Systemstöd was responsible for the implementation of the business system Sage and we for the WooCommerce. The result was a website that started generating sales – completely without marketing – the day after launch.

What does it cost?

E-commerce

We have turnkey solutions for E-commerce, which means that you can come a long way with your project right from the start of working with us. However, this is still only the general starting point in your project, because no two projects are alike – neither are the budgets. However, we recommend you have at least SEK 300,000 to spend on a project to integrate with Sage.

We always start by conducting a workshop where we find the right thing to do and decide the scope of the project. The workshop has a fixed price of SEK 20,000.

Contact us to get a demo of our basic solution and to book a workshop.

Sage

To carry out a project with Sage, the following is needed:

• Sage X3 implementation project – normally SEK 250-300k
• Sage X3 license cost – ca SEK 80-100k (One time payment)
• Sage X3 annual support cost – ca SEK 15-20k / year
• Sage X3 operating cost (Private cloud) – ca SEK 5k / Month (capable of 3-4 orders/second – more orders implies more expensive operating costs)