[disantlor]

I find myself regularly trying to talk my clients out of going headless on Shopify. The benefits are so hyped (and potentially real) but the cost/maintenance is significant.

I’ve come into working on multiple different headless sites developed by others who then walked away and left an entirely non-technical team to sort it out.

A well-built Shopify theme works great and plenty fast for even medium sized companies.

[interstice]

We switched to building headless Shopify sites a while back due to constant requests from clients to do things that were not possible in Shopify alone, quite a long list but a lot of it boiled down to rich content or having more control over 'serverside' logic. Our approach is now at a point where I'm more confident in our GraphQL backed headless stores than any of our Shopify themes in terms of maintenance and ease of updating.

Since then Shopify has updated a bit (although not all that much, a lot of the issues remain) and we have had a wave of requests in the last year to build in Shopify - largely since none of the local marketing agencies want to touch headless.

It's been a bit disheartening really. I've been trying to get to the bottom of the marketing issues but I haven't been able to get clear answers on what they are.

Shopify also doesn't have amazing support for headless (double login on checkout is a big one), but with the rollout of their own Oxygen/Hydrogen platforms I've been waiting to see if they manage to solve these issues for their own solutions.

[disantlor]

Yeah, I think if Oxygen/Hydrogen can smooth out some of those issues it would make more sense and be more self-documenting. The current state of hodge podging work arounds requires institutional knowledge to maintain.

I’ve found though that often when clients say they need something that only a headless solution can provide, they actually don’t truly need it. And once the actual requirements are focused, a well built Shopify theme is plenty sufficient.

Maybe we are working at a different scale of companies though.

The main advantage of headless to me is the ability to get the speed of the site way up. But the nature of e-commerce is to add tons of pixels and other junk so it can defeat the advantages (and much harder to talk them out of adding pixels sadly…)

[interstice]

I'd be interested in chatting about this further - I don't know many others operating in the same space, I can be contacted through the website in my profile (Director).

Our scale is a bit unusual, its more like high end small scale than large scale, think more like an architect designed house rather than a commercial building. As a result every site has some fairly unique features and Shopify often struggles with those. It's getting tricker to balance over time as the bar for a 'basic' store keeps being raised though.