The future of e-commerce: "Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change”

Astronomical genius Stephen Hawking once said: “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change”

When choosing a new digital platform, you are sorting out the playing field that will allow your organization to respond to new developments in the future. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, VR & AR, the Internet of Things. Plus the way your increasingly demanding customer wants to use them. How exactly that will happen tomorrow is unknown today. Therefore, invest primarily in the maximum agility of your new platform.

Where the customer experience is central, front and back offices are no longer separate worlds

Your customer does research on his desktop, orders on his phone, has it delivered at a pre-selected time, or picks it up in the store. Afterwards, he wants to be able to find his purchase directly on his personal page. To make sure he will be able to get in touch with a chatbot or service line if he has questions about the product or wants to return it. Those who put the needs of this modern customer first no longer work with silos, and have seamlessly integrated the front and back end of their business.

Aligning business and IT goals is a crucial step toward digital maturity.

Digital platforms and other technology are making an increasingly large mark on the core business of many organizations. Therefore, it is important that marketers and IT people, for example, learn to discuss each other's language. Leading organizations therefore work with multidisciplinary teams in which these previously separate worlds start to work ever more closely together to achieve common goals. Therefore, a new digital platform also often requires a new organizational structure.

Reference architecture: the importance of a 'dot on the horizon' should not be underestimated

The selection of a new platform is only the beginning of an endless process of recalibration and change. To make sure you don’t lose sight of the intended result, a dot on the horizon is indispensable. For that purpose, create an example structure that you would set up if you were not dealing with pre-existing hardware and software or other thresholds. For this reference architecture, MACH (microservices, api-first, containers, headless) is a useful starting point.

Dare to dream about the future - and look at the possibilities of a headless platform

I mentioned them briefly: machine learning, artificial intelligence, VR & AR, the Internet of Things. Today you may not see what these and numerous other shiny new technologies could mean for your organization tomorrow. But what if the platform you choose today doesn't adequately support any of these potentially game changing technologies tomorrow?

Composable architecture

Organizations that understand how important this is are moving to a new kind of digital platform. This headless or 'composable' architecture makes it possible to continuously add new components without adjusting the rest of your digital platform. The speed with which you can respond to customer needs and innovative technological possibilities therefore increases tremendously.

Download our whitepaper

Do you also want to know exactly what headless commerce is, and how it works, what the benefits and challenges are and why headless commerce is the future of e-commerce? Download our comprehensive whitepaper "The future of e-commerce is headless" right now.