Chris Reddick, President and CEO of Clarity Ventures, and Ron Halversen, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity, discuss the advantages of headless eCommerce in online auctions.

Part 1 of a 3-part series 

RON: Hey, good morning, Chris. Ron here. Another great webinar day.  
 
CHRIS: Hi, Ron. Sure is, very excited to dive in today. This one is going to be really cool. We're going to be talking about headless platforms with auction eCommerce. This is a powerful capability and something that we think listeners are really going to want to be aware of, even if they're not going to take advantage of it right away. It’s strongly recommended that you listen in and get the main points. This will be really helpful to know about in the future [for some people], but a lot of you may end up immediately finding benefit in this. Just learning about it.

what is hipaa

RON: And we're going to be talking about a few different terms, like embedded. We'll talk about headless eCommerce, we'll talk about decoupled, there's going to be a handful of good things and we're going to dive into that today. II think it's going to be very, very helpful. If you want, why don't you go ahead and just kick us off and give us the technical definition of what headless means?  
 
CHRIS: Absolutely. So the core concept here is that a lot of applications on the back-end functionality in the data, they're intermingled and married, and just a giant jumble with a UI. And so there's an architectural concept around separating those. And the idea is that a lot of companies will use the same back-end functionality and workflows and data across different mediums of user interface. 

what is hipaa

CHRIS: This terminology for that came about, and it's called headless eCommerce. You can think of it as—it's a crude analogy—but think of it as like a headless body. And you've got all the functions and organs, but you can swap out the heads. And the user interface in this analogy would be the head.  
 
So you can have the same base functionality and data utilized across multiple different channels and mediums, and those are consuming the same workflows and data consistently. Without having to do extra work, [you can use] this headless eCommerce model, where you have the same engine and the same fuel, if you want to think of it as a car analogy. But you have different bodies, interiors. And so that's what we're going to be diving into and giving some examples of is, how does that practically work in the real world. 
 
RON: And it's not even just swapping out the heads or the bodies. That is technically what's capable, but it's the ability to then do them all at the same time simultaneously. So each head could use the body at the same time, meaning and then in real terms here we could have a mobile app using the eAuction platform and people bidding on a mobile device, and you'd have people bidding on a kiosk, and you could have people bidding on a website all at the same time because all three of those heads or CMS or whatever you want to call them, all of those application UIs are accessing that same body of functionality from the platform. So yeah, I love your analogies. That's exactly correct.  

I'm just going to define what CORS is and how we've done that. And then I'd love you to really dive into the APIs and the tech speak that I don't know as well. The great thing about it, at a high level, is that you can implement this in any CMS. So if you had a WordPress website, a Drupal website, a DotNetNuke (DNN CMS)—whatever you've got, you could literally have any existing corporate marketing website—and then you want to embed or expose the functionality within that website.

what is hipaa

RON: I think everybody on the call hopefully knows WordPress. I'm going to go grab a gravity forms plugin. I add that, and then gravity forms has now given me a UI where I have a page to create a form. When I save that form it assigns an ID, then I go back out to a WordPress page and say “Display form ID seven.”  

And now embedded right on that page, it looks like it's a WordPress form, but it's not. It's a gravity form displaying on a different page.  

That's really what we're talking about. We're talking about being able to go to any CMS, and on any page or any mobile app on any UI, and exposing eAuctions and the bidding UI and the sign up and verification UI, the registration, the log in. All of those different elements can then be exposed in any of those UIs. 

If we're doing it with a website—one of the technologies we'll be talking about today is called CORS, and that stands for cross-origin resource sharing. I'm sure everybody's been on a browser at some point in time, clicked on a link and it popped up and said “unsafe,” or their browser has determined that they're leaving a safe link or something like that and you shouldn't load it.  
 
That's because the source that is trying to be accessed through that link is not a trusted source. So CORS says, “Hey, we're going to share our CMS space with another resource, and this resource may be over at a URL called auction.acme.com. I want you to trust any elements loaded from that other domain, and then I can go to my corporate website, acme.com, and I can load any elements on any page from that domain. And I basically told the browser through using CORS to go ahead and trust those elements to show up on the page. And it's not going to throw up those errors and it allows it to have this symbiotic trust relationship between these two different domains. So that's basically what CORS does, it allows us to embed elements on a web page.

what is hipaa

RON: Now, there's a heck of a lot more than that because you don't have to use CORS you don't have to do that. You can literally access the platform in the API directly. And that's what I want you to talk about, because that's where most of some of the other channels might come in that may not be able to simply just embed and display some of those elements.   
 
CHRIS: Yeah, that's exactly right. The explanation of CORS I just want to hit on, just bringing it home for the listeners that have an auction platform. What this means is you can literally have an embeddable component from the marketplace that we build with you or that you build with another partner that does this. You can literally offer everyone who's holding an auction the ability to take a snippet of code that they don't have to know any software development. They can copy that code and drop it into their site 

Of course, you've probably seen this with iframes and Google Maps and things like this. But we're talking about a more immersive opportunity with using CORS and using headless eCommerce solutions. So it can be much more of a rich experience that they can incorporate into their site. The beauty here is that we can calibrate the level of the delta that that experience is presented, and it can be a simple block of code that they paste in just like you would with a YouTube video or Google Maps. Or it can be something more robust where it's—like you were talking about, Ron—it's taking advantage of these APIs and these endpoints.   
 
The really cool thing for most auctions, there is some form of needing to upload and input different types of auctions into the system. And this can be quite a challenge, especially at scale if everything has to happen through the site itself. So typically, we're going to at minimum want to be able to take advantage of leveraging mobile and tablet applications, especially have native capabilities with the camera and video and things like this, being able to leverage those tools, even barcode scanning, just some of those basic things that we want to incorporate, make it easier for the user. 

An example would be they can barcode scan something if it has a SKU, then it will attempt to auto-populate the description and the content, and then they can take a picture, and if this makes sense for your particular scenario, it will go ahead and put the geocode information on there so we can see that it's a legit picture and verify that, there are some things that we can do around this anyway. 

Anyway, long story short, the beauty here is that all of this, whenever we're using headless eCommerce platforms, is the data is going to push into the same database that's being used to present the site. So, without having to change anything on the back end, without having to add extra pieces, we can build a mobile and tablet application. We can also do things like build a specific use case scenario, maybe for a particular category, so we can have another site, that’s maybe just a simple site that's based on WordPress.  

And that that site is just for a particular segment of, let's say, real estate in a particular market, and it's a wholesale real estate purchasing group. So maybe your business is selling homes online, but now you want to go after wholesale real estate and maybe sell to institutional investors for a particular set of regions, and you just want a simple site that speaks to them. Well, what would it be like to then just easily leverage the investment that you've already made into a robust eCommerce platform for auctions and then basically parlay that into another niche focus that you can dominate?  
 
That's really one of the major benefits of headless eCommerce software, is you literally can take this extremely powerful functionality, and this need for consistent data across your enterprise and deliver it in this precision format that's surgically delivered for a particular niche. So it's just a really powerful capability.  

One of the other things that we see a lot with this is working with partners. So, you're at an event and you're networking, and you meet another auction platform group. And they say, “Man, it would be so awesome if we could get your auctions onto our system and help syndicate some of what you're doing. We would love to partner with you guys. It's not really overly competitive. And, maybe we could cross-function with promoting our auctions together.”  
 
And so what do you do? Like, that sounds great, but what do you do mechanically to do that scale? Well, you want them to be able to access your data and restrict it to what part of that data you want them to have access to. So, you can do that with a headless eCommerce framework for auctions. Based on the user roles and, without getting into the detailed weeds, we can expose that data.  

There are several other examples that I think we'll get into as we go. But I think the summary here, Ron, is that it's a powerful capability that you're going to want to think about as you're planning out your project so that you can continue to benefit from your investment in your platform long after that initial investment is done.

Continue to Part 2 to discover the difference between headless and decoupled.