[amoopa]

As someone who works in the commerce space day-to-day, the trend is interesting and definitely something you will hear a lot of ecommerce managers and businesses discuss.

Aside from the frontend flexibility, one major advantage of building API-first in an ecommerce context is that it can allow different parts of the system to be developed and maintained independently. This can make it easier to update and extend individual components without affecting the overall system - which is often a headache with current systems such as Shopify, Magento etc.

IMO, One of the most interesting nuances in the space is the focus shift between OS and closed-source solutions in this space. The problem for larger companies (+$50M) is that they seek to build something their tech teams can take full ownership of and easily inject custom logic into. This is not as easy with proprietary solutions even if they are headless and API-first. Instead these businesses end up looking into either building something fully custom or seek out open source solutions like Medusa (JS/TS), Sylius (PHP) or Spree (Ruby) to use as a foundation to build a custom setup from.

In general though, the headless / API-first trend definitely seem to be something that a lot of companies are exploring at the moment.