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.
Composable Commerce
Composable commerce assembles best-of-breed services for every layer of the ecommerce stack through APIs. Commerce, search, CMS, payment, CRM, and PIM each come from a specialist vendor.
Frontend as a Service
Frontend-as-a-service is a productized delivery model for headless commerce storefronts. The merchant licenses a pre-built storefront instead of building one from scratch.
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.
Headless architecture
Headless architecture is a design pattern where the frontend and the backend are built as separate applications and communicate through APIs. In ecommerce, this means the storefront is decoupled from the commerce engine.
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.
Headless CMS
A headless CMS stores and delivers content through APIs without rendering any user interface itself. The CMS owns the content; a separate frontend application decides how to display it across web, mobile, and other channels.
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.
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.