Heads up: the future of e-commerce is headless. That’s why, on May 26, Netlify is hosting the 2021 Headless Commerce Summit. We’re bringing together top digital agencies, popular e-commerce brands and technology vendors in the Headless Commerce ecosystem to discuss best practices and together, chart the future of e-commerce.
About Headless Commerce Summit 2021
Headless Commerce Summit is a free half-day, virtual event for web development leaders interested in learning about the Jamstack web architecture, including headless e-commerce platforms, headless content management systems, APIs and modern development workflows.
\ Whether you’re just learning about headless e-commerce, you’ve already started to go headless, or you’re a Jamstack pro, this conference will give you insights and actionable information to make your site and your business move faster.
Headless Commerce: e-commerce on the Jamstack
What’s headless commerce? Headless is an architectural approach where backend services providing data and functionality are decoupled from the frontend UI. Jamstack is a modern web architecture pioneered specifically as a companion to headless backend systems.
For commerce companies, the benefits of a Jamstack architecture can include improved personalization and customer experience, better site performance and reliability, and the ability to iterate faster.
Speaker Lineup
Keynote: Incremental Migration Strategies: Adopting Jamstack Workflows in eCommerce
Speakers: Netlify co-founder Chris Bach
Headless commerce has all sorts of business advantages. Of course we want better customer experiences and improved performance. But without the right team workflows and adoption strategies, getting the benefits of headless commerce is easier said than done. In this keynote, Netlify co-founder Chris Bach will help rethink team adoption of Jamstack architecture. They’ll walk through simple, incremental migration strategies on the Jamstack, and how to improve developer workflows and boost productivity with headless architecture.
Scaling from 0 to 6 million stores using Netlify and Jamstack
Speakers: Rick Takes, Director of Engineering and Paras Chadha, Senior Engineering Manager at Spring
Learn how the team at Spring (formerly Teespring) designed a headless architecture for commerce and scaled to over 6 million stores. Rick and Paras will talk about their approach to designing their modern API and reducing reliance on their rails monolith while still driving the product forward. They’ll touch on the stack utilizing serverless, AWS API gateway, Lambdas, React and more.
Panel: Making virtual hype real - How ComplexLand used Shopify Plus for a new commerce experience
Speakers: Victoria Duggan, Program Engineering Manager, Shopify; Andrés Smerkin, Lead Developer, Riess Group; William Chen, Technical Director, Jam3
Complexcon is one of the planet’s most hyped events for streetwear fans, brands, and creators. But during the pandemic, it had to be translated to a virtual experience. Enter ComplexLand, built by design & experience agency Jam3 and COMPLEX NETWORKS in collaboration with Shopify Plus partner Riess Group and Shopify. ComplexLand is a 3D e-commerce-enabled video game where users can shop from over 60 brands. The free, immersive virtual experience featured exclusive drops, music, food, and concerts.
Breakout: Everlane delivers high-speed hyper-personalization at scale on their Jamstack site
Steve Sewell, Founder and CEO, Builder.io
The e-commerce powerhouse, Everlane, published +100 versions of its homepage in a month and dynamically delivered variants to visitors based on their previous purchases, new vs. return customers, etc., without relying on developers. How? With a blazingly-fast React frontend and a combination of static and dynamic rendering paired with a headless CMS (like Builder.io). In this talk we will cover how Everlane is going to market 4x faster and delivering a high performance personalized experience.
Lightning Talk: JAAMIn’: Inclusive and Accessible Omnichannel Strategies
\ Speaker: Rachael Thompson, Developer Advocate, BigCommerce
This lightning talk is a walk-through of best practices for creating an accessible and inclusive omnichannel strategy leveraging the Jamstack using a real-life use case. Starting from the data layer to our product catalog, we will look at each piece of the commerce journey from the lens of accessibility, inclusivity, and networking. By the end of the presentation you should be able to have a firm grasp of why headless commerce is the best for making the web JAAMIN’.
Lightning Talk: Master UI architecture for headless search and browse in e-commerce
Speaker: Matthew Foyle, Senior Solutions Engineer, Algolia
The API first ecosystem and modern web technologies allow for more freedom in design than ever before. With this in mind, how do you implement a best in class experience when it comes to search and discovery in e-commerce? You’ll learn from some live examples and current research, and you’ll get insight into open source libraries which can accelerate development while maintaining adaptability.
Caching strategies for large e-commerce sites
Speaker: Cassidy Williams, Principal Developer Experience Engineer, Netlify
One of the reasons Jamstack is so popular is how well it delivers performance benefits at scale. But if you’ve got a massive site and are putting hundreds of thousands of assets through a sequential build process, things start to get a little dicey. The pre-rendering step becomes a bottleneck, leaving development teams waiting around for builds to complete. Ultimately, this slows down the speed of iteration—and nobody wants that.
So, how can developers with huge sites get around long build times?
In this talk, Cassidy Williams will cover different caching strategies to improve long build times, including serverless, edge personalization, and some tips on the best ways to get the benefits of the Jamstack with Next.js.
Supercharging the restaurant industry with Netlify + Jamstack
Speaker: Zahid Mahmood, Founder, buskana.com
What happens when brick and mortar stores collide with Jamstack? For Zahid Mahmood, founder of buskana.com, the combination of Netlify and the Jamstack has opened a whole new world of possibilities - one where building, deploying, hosting and maintaining is done through a single GitHub repo.
Join this session and learn how a one-person shop is supercharging the restaurant industry in London through a headless approach.
