Headless e-commerce: BigCommerce without the frontend
BigCommerce's headless approach gives you a proper e-commerce engine without forcing you into their templates. Here's how it works and when it makes sense.
Have you ever felt trapped by your e-commerce platform? Most e-commerce platforms want to own your entire site. Your product pages, your checkout, your blog, your homepage, everything lives inside their system, styled with their templates, constrained by their page builder. For a lot of businesses like yours that's fine. But when your marketing team wants a homepage that doesn't look like every other Shopify store, or your product pages need custom configurators, or you want to run your content through a proper CMS, that's where headless comes in. But what does that actually look like in practice?
BigCommerce has been pushing their headless capabilities harder than most, and having built a couple of projects on it over the past year, I think they've got the balance right. You get a solid e-commerce backend, catalogue management, inventory, pricing, tax, shipping, checkout, accessible via a well-documented API. What you build on top of that is entirely up to you.
How the architecture works
In a traditional BigCommerce setup, you'd build a Stencil theme that runs on their servers. In a headless setup, you ignore Stencil entirely. Your frontend is a separate application, in my case, usually Next.js, that pulls product data, cart state, and customer information from BigCommerce's APIs. The checkout can either be handled via BigCommerce's embedded checkout (which drops into your site as an iframe) or, on their higher-tier plans, via the Checkout SDK which gives you full control over the checkout UI.
The practical benefit for you is that your marketing site, your blog, your landing pages, none of that needs to live inside BigCommerce. You can use whatever CMS and whatever frontend framework suits the project. BigCommerce handles the bits it's good at (processing orders, managing inventory, calculating tax) and gets out of the way for everything else.
Headless isn't always the right call. If you're a small shop with fifty products and a straightforward catalogue, a standard BigCommerce Stencil theme will get you live faster and cost less to maintain. The headless approach adds architectural complexity, you're managing two systems instead of one, and you need developers comfortable with API integration.
Where it shines is when the frontend experience needs to be genuinely custom, or when e-commerce is just one part of a larger digital presence. I've used it for a client whose product range required a custom filtering and comparison tool that would've been impossible within Stencil's constraints. The product data lives in BigCommerce, but the browsing experience is entirely bespoke.
The pricing question
BigCommerce's standard plans start at around £23/month, and the APIs are available on all plans. That's a meaningful advantage over Shopify, where headless access requires Shopify Plus at £1,600/month. For small and mid-sized businesses exploring headless, BigCommerce's pricing makes it a more realistic option.
If you're considering a headless e-commerce build, or you're frustrated with the limitations of your current platform's frontend, I'd love to hear from you, drop me a message and I can talk through the options.
Chris Ryan
Managing Director
17+ years in full-stack web development, most of it leading teams agency-side across e-commerce, CMS platforms, and bespoke applications. Specialises in infrastructure, system integration, and data privacy, with hands-on experience as a Data Protection Officer. Founded Innatus Digital in 2020 to offer the kind of honest, technically-led partnership that he felt was missing from the agency world.