Search by Algolia
What is online retail merchandising? An introduction
e-commerce

What is online retail merchandising? An introduction

Done any shopping on an ecommerce website lately? If so, you know a smooth online shopper experience is not optional ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

5 considerations for Black Friday 2023 readiness
e-commerce

5 considerations for Black Friday 2023 readiness

It’s hard to imagine having to think about Black Friday less than 4 months out from the previous one ...

Piyush Patel

Chief Strategic Business Development Officer

How to increase your sales and ROI with optimized ecommerce merchandising
e-commerce

How to increase your sales and ROI with optimized ecommerce merchandising

What happens if an online shopper arrives on your ecommerce site and: Your navigation provides no obvious or helpful direction ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Mobile search UX best practices, part 3: Optimizing display of search results
ux

Mobile search UX best practices, part 3: Optimizing display of search results

In part 1 of this blog-post series, we looked at app interface design obstacles in the mobile search experience ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Mobile search UX best practices, part 2: Streamlining search functionality
ux

Mobile search UX best practices, part 2: Streamlining search functionality

In part 1 of this series on mobile UX design, we talked about how designing a successful search user experience ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Mobile search UX best practices, part 1: Understanding the challenges
ux

Mobile search UX best practices, part 1: Understanding the challenges

Welcome to our three-part series on creating winning search UX design for your mobile app! This post identifies developer ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Teaching English with Zapier and Algolia
engineering

Teaching English with Zapier and Algolia

National No Code Day falls on March 11th in the United States to encourage more people to build things online ...

Alita Leite da Silva

How AI search enables ecommerce companies to boost revenue and cut costs
ai

How AI search enables ecommerce companies to boost revenue and cut costs

Consulting powerhouse McKinsey is bullish on AI. Their forecasting estimates that AI could add around 16 percent to global GDP ...

Michelle Adams

Chief Revenue Officer at Algolia

What is digital product merchandising?
e-commerce

What is digital product merchandising?

How do you sell a product when your customers can’t assess it in person: pick it up, feel what ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Scaling marketplace search with AI
ai

Scaling marketplace search with AI

It is clear that for online businesses and especially for Marketplaces, content discovery can be especially challenging due to the ...

Bharat Guruprakash

Chief Product Officer

The changing face of digital merchandising
e-commerce

The changing face of digital merchandising

This 2-part feature dives into the transformational journey made by digital merchandising to drive positive ecommerce experiences. Part 1 ...

Reshma Iyer

Director of Product Marketing, Ecommerce

What’s a convolutional neural network and how is it used for image recognition in search?
ai

What’s a convolutional neural network and how is it used for image recognition in search?

A social media user is shown snapshots of people he may know based on face-recognition technology and asked if ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

What’s organizational knowledge and how can you make it accessible to the right people?
product

What’s organizational knowledge and how can you make it accessible to the right people?

How’s your company’s organizational knowledge holding up? In other words, if an employee were to leave, would they ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Adding trending recommendations to your existing e-commerce store
engineering

Adding trending recommendations to your existing e-commerce store

Recommendations can make or break an online shopping experience. In a world full of endless choices and infinite scrolling, recommendations ...

Ashley Huynh

Ecommerce trends for 2023: Personalization
e-commerce

Ecommerce trends for 2023: Personalization

Algolia sponsored the 2023 Ecommerce Site Search Trends report which was produced and written by Coleman Parkes Research. The report ...

Piyush Patel

Chief Strategic Business Development Officer

10 ways to know it’s fake AI search
ai

10 ways to know it’s fake AI search

You think your search engine really is powered by AI? Well maybe it is… or maybe not.  Here’s a ...

Michelle Adams

Chief Revenue Officer at Algolia

Cosine similarity: what is it and how does it enable effective (and profitable) recommendations?
ai

Cosine similarity: what is it and how does it enable effective (and profitable) recommendations?

You looked at this scarf twice; need matching mittens? How about an expensive down vest? You watched this goofy flick ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

What is cognitive search, and what could it mean for your business?
ai

What is cognitive search, and what could it mean for your business?

“I can’t find it.”  Sadly, this conclusion is often still part of the modern enterprise search experience. But ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Looking for something?

What is fake headless? How to spot fake headless and select world-class microservices

Feb 10th 2022 product

What is fake headless? How to spot fake headless and select world-class microservices
facebookfacebooklinkedinlinkedintwittertwittermailmail

The definition of headless is clean cut — or it should be, at least. In practice, there are blurred edges, generous interpretations, and shifting definitions.

Headless architecture “decouples” a website’s front-end from its back-end. Alex Shiferman, CTO at Nuts.com, describes the front-end as the “presentation layer.” It’s the content, user interface, and user experience. He calls the back-end the “business engine.” That’s services like your payment processing, order tracking, fulfillment, and so on.

Likewise with composable – it also has a fairly straightforward definition. In a composable application, each element works independently from one another and can be replaced without causing any impact on the rest of the system. Third-party experts build the elements to solve a very specific problem, to be easily plugged-in, implemented, and connected through an API layer to other pieces in the system.

Think of the composable enterprise as Lego, says Shiferman. Instead of buying one complete tool — an eCommerce platform, a finance system, a project management tool, whatever — you buy building blocks. Whenever you need a new tool, you combine blocks to create something bespoke for your organization. 

“If I buy a dollhouse for my daughter, it comes fully built,” he continues. “But if I buy a Lego dollhouse, she can move things around and make it really her own.”

What fake headless & fake composable look like?

While the definitions of these frequently used terms are fairly straightforward, the execution varies quite a lot. As the word du jour, headless, pops up in advertising copy, marketing material, and product documentation far more than it ought to. When fake headless services work their way into a technology stack, it can cause havoc.

With due diligence, however, software buyers can sort the wheat from the chaff. Although lots of services claim to be headless, the fakes rarely stand up under scrutiny. Here are three questions you can ask to test vendors’ headless claims.

#1 Do their APIs represent a subset of platform functionality?

“When you get into it, you might find that APIs are a subset of overall platform functionality,” says Shiferman. “You can only do this from the admin console. You can only do that from the command line.”

This tends to exhibit one of two ways. Either the API simply doesn’t offer some functionality or the API operates differently to the admin console. Both create similar complications: unexpected coding, unnecessary complexity, and abnormal operations.

#2 Did their service develop from an on-prem product?

The composable enterprise and headless are relatively new ideas. They only started gaining real traction in the last five to 10 years. Keeping that in mind, it’s unlikely that you’ll find a headless on-prem service. It just doesn’t make sense. With vendors who have recently moved their service away from on-prem, it’s worth investigating their technology.

“I’ve seen old school on-premise eCommerce vendors try to transition to a cloud offering,” says  Shiferman. “I’ve seen them struggle. That’s not how they build their tools and platforms. There’s often an underlying foundational limitation. You can’t just easily port a product to the cloud.”

#3 Do they have any limitations, however small, on the front-end?

 When vendors develop products and then transition to headless architecture, they often get near but not quite the whole way. True headless, for example, can support any front-end. Fake headless, meanwhile, might have limitations or requirements. 

True headless & true composable enable engineers to say “Yes, we can do that”

All-in-one platforms are like cooked spaghetti — services are tangled with each other. When multiple engineers are working on the same platform, it can get messy. Say someone changes the ordering system. That has knock on effects to the check out, fulfillment, inventory management, and a dozen more services. On the other hand, composable enterprises are like uncooked spaghetti. Each microservice stands on its own. “Every piece of functionality is distinct,” explains Shiferman. “You have clearly defined contracts. You can really manage everything at a very granular level.” Because each function is distinct, you can have 50 people all working on the same platform without everything becoming chaotic.

“You have to figure out how to support business users in different ways,” says Shiferman. “Ultimately, your goal is to enable either customer experience or business user experience. If you start saying, ‘Do this piece of work here, but do this piece of work there,’ it becomes hard to manage.”

Fake services hamstring an organization’s ability to scale. With truly headless services, engineering teams know they have all of their tools in one place. They have “full feature coverage,” as Shiferman puts it. But say one microservice turns out to be a fake headless product. When the engineers start building, they’re going to discover inconsistencies. Those inconsistencies will demand a new architecture. Suddenly, your team is supporting not one, but two, architectures, which is no easy feat.

Discover true headless search

“The term ‘headless’ is already part of the problem,” said Neha Sampat, CEO of API-first CMS Contentstack, during an interview with Diginomica. It implies the concept is merely cutting away the front-end and adding an API.

But headless is far more than that.

Headless means offering everything via API, not a selective subset of features. It means supporting any front-end, not just a chosen few. It means building API-first from the ground up, not adapting dated architecture to piggyback on the latest trend. It means being automatically omnichannel and vertical agnostic.

We built Algolia to be truly headless, starting with an API-first foundation. From the moment we started in 2012, our customers have been able to access every last mote of functionality via API — indexing, search, filtering, analytics, merchandising, A/B testing, everything. “With headless services, APIs are your starting point,” says Shiferman. “APIs are your foundational layer. The lowest common denominator is always the API.”

Because we have a clear distinction between front and back-end, Algolia supports any type of front-end — JS, React, Angular, Vue, Android, iOS, Kotlin, and so on. We built an agnostic product, too. Algolia isn’t just a media or marketplace search function that you can crowbar into different use cases. It can handle any device, any use case, and any vertical because we built it to be flexible and adaptable.

Going headless

So what are time-strapped engineers, designers, and technical leaders to do? How do you sort authentic headless microservices from the fakes? 

To unlock the benefits of headless, engineers, designers, and leaders must ruthlessly evaluate microservices, cutting away the fakes and frauds to reveal genuinely headless products. We can help with that. When you do that, you can usher in a new era of powerful and personalized software for your organization.

What are you waiting for? Discover true headless search today.

About the author
John Stewart

VP Corporate Marketing

Recommended Articles

Powered byAlgolia Algolia Recommend

What is a headless website? A definition and examples
ux

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

What is a headless CMS (content management system)?
product

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

What is headless ecommerce and how does it work?
product

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager