Headless commerce glossary
Short reference entries on headless, composable, frontend, and ecommerce architecture terms.
B2B Ecommerce
B2B ecommerce is selling to companies through a digital storefront. The buying behaviour, account structure, and pricing model differ from D2C. A serious B2B storefront ships those differences out of the box.
Headless Commerce
Headless commerce is an architecture where the storefront and the commerce engine are separate applications connected by APIs. The shopper sees one site. The team operates two systems.
Total Cost of Ownership
Total cost of ownership is the full sum of what an ecommerce platform costs over its lifetime, not just the license fee. License, build, operations, and the people who keep it all running.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are three measurements that capture how a storefront feels to a real shopper. They affect SEO ranking and conversion. Frntkey targets the green threshold on all three out of the box.
Monolith vs Headless
A monolithic commerce platform bundles the frontend and backend into one system. A headless commerce setup separates them and connects via API. The choice shapes cost, speed of change, and how locked-in you are.
Multi-market Ecommerce
Multi-market ecommerce serves several countries from one operational stack. Currencies, languages, tax rules, payment providers, and shipping rates all vary per market. The frontend has to handle all of them on the same codebase.
Webhook vs API
A webhook is how one system tells another that something happened. An API is how one system asks another for the current state. Headless commerce uses both, constantly, for different jobs.
Composable commerce
Composable commerce means the whole commerce stack — storefront, commerce engine, content, search, PIM, payments — is composed from specialized services connected by APIs, instead of bought as one suite.
PIM — Product Information Management
A PIM is the source of truth for product information: names, descriptions, attributes, images, translations. It sits between the suppliers and every channel that displays a product.