Headless commerce is an architecture where the commerce backend (catalog, orders, inventory) and the storefront frontend are decoupled, communicating via GraphQL or REST APIs.
Famous examples: Shopify Hydrogen, BigCommerce + Next.js Commerce, commercetools + custom Next.js, Magento PWA Studio. The promise: frontend flexibility, edge performance, multi-channel reuse (web + app + kiosk from one backend).
The trade-off: operational complexity. Headless requires hosting the frontend (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare), potentially a separate CMS (Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok), frontend engineering capacity, and DevOps for deployment pipelines. TCO typically runs $5,000–$50,000+/month versus a few hundred for hosted SaaS.
The 2026 sweet spot is "hybrid hosted" — a platform that delivers headless-grade performance (Next.js 16 + Cache Components + PPR) as a single managed codebase. This avoids the operational overhead of true headless while capturing most of its performance benefits.