Creating an eCommerce website nowadays is relatively easy.
Some tools will allow you to create a store in minutes with lots of baked-in features.
Getting traffic to your store is a whole other story.
In the early eCommerce days, the challenge was technical: not everyone knew or had the resources to set up a store. Today, the scenario is different. The hurdle is to get noticed in a sea of other options.
There is a myriad of strategies that businesses implement for this. However, they all have the same objective: get attention and direct it to the products they want to sell.
At some point, every brand realizes they need a way to serve content natively, AKA from their website. To effectively show and manage content, Content Management Systems come into place.
At this point, a couple of questions appear: What is an eCommerce website CMS? What is a CMS website?
An eCommerce website is fundamentally different to a CMS website. A CMS website is where you manage and create content you later serve in your eCommerce website.
Your eCommerce website is your storefront. Your CMS website is a place for you to manage your content.
There are CMS providers that you might be able to modify and make into an eCommerce, but it's not what they usually do.
Integrating a store with the correct CMS is not always straightforward.
Each company will have different requirements. Not all CMSs do the same things.
When evaluating alternatives, it's good to keep your use case in mind and ignore the hype around a particular product.
If you've searched around for CMSs, you might have found there seem to be two big groups: Headed and Headless CMSs.
What is a headed CMS?
A headed CMS is a 'complete' CMS. It's a closed solution. You create the content. The CMS handles everything else.
It usually means that it's harder to do a seamless integration between your system and the CMS.
On the flip side, it will take care of everything for you. You can create a new entry for a piece of content, format it in the CMS editor and hit publish. The entry will be shown and displayed.
While having everything work sounds appealing, it can be very limiting. It usually means you'll need to install the whole CMS into a domain.
You can work around it by setting it to a subdomain or a subpath. However, it will be hard to provide a uniform user experience.
It also means that you cannot integrate both pieces. What happens if you want to create banners, host them in your CMS and serve them on your homepage?
While there are ways around it, they are usually counterintuitive, allow little control over how the data flows and are less than desirable.
Making a bunch of API calls to the CMS to get the entries under the hood and having to parse and mangle them so that you can display them is a bad idea.
What's a headless CMS?
It's the opposite of a headed CMS. A headless CMS means you can create and manage your content on it. However, how the data is consumed and displayed will be up to you.
It gives you a lot of freedom but requires more implementation. The whole integration between the CMS and your site is up to you to figure out.
You'll be able to show your content and entries in the best way you see fit.
Headless CMSs are akin to APIs. You don't need to install anything anywhere.
You can integrate content into any page that you want.
The obvious negative here is you have to develop and maintain these integrations.
Do you want to create a new page with new pieces of content? Something completely different to anything you have right now? You'll need to do the work for it.
Hopefully, we've answered this question by now.
The choice to make is between flexibility and integration. If your brand needs a custom user experience and to serve content as part of your on-site experience, you'll need to go with a headless CMS.
If, on the other hand, your content can live as a standalone section like a blog or similar, then you can probably get away with using a headed CMS.
Does this mean that headed CMSs cannot be modified? Most certainly not, but it's hard.
There is a reason why there are titles like 'WordPress developer'. Usually, the platforms allow only a certain amount of custom work over them. It's also not the best development experience.
Do I need a CMS?
It will vary on a case-by-case basis.
Does content play a role in your growth strategy? What kind of content?
How do you envision your content distribution? Do you need shareable content linked from different sites and social media, or are you only doing social media native posts?
Your eCommerce website CMS should fit your current and future needs.
Generally speaking, as your company expands, there is a desire to have control over your content creation and distribution. It inevitably requires something that manages large amounts of content, and CMSs enter the discussion.
When you have a content team pushing a lot of targeted pieces, you need to enable the team to achieve maximum effect.
You don't want to have them tracking pieces of content in a spreadsheet and storing them in a drive somewhere. It's not a scalable solution.
You also don't want them to have to do code changes each time they want to post something. That's not their speciality.
You could have a whole team pumping out content that is not reachable or not integrated correctly with your site, which will reduce its efficacy.
A CMS does a lot of the heavy lifting of allowing multiple people to work on entries, versioning the content, scheduling it, etc.
If you think in-site content will be part of your growth strategy, the answer is likely 'Yes'.
You now have a clear picture of the different types of CMSs and what they can do for you.
Your eCommerce website CMS should be one more tool in your toolkit that should pair nicely with your eCommerce management software. If you want more information about eCommerce management software, read this article.
If you still have questions about your eCommerce website CMS, send us a message.