Chris Reddick, President and CEO of Clarity Ventures, and Ron Halversen, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity, talk about why headless is efficient and how to choose a decoupled eCommerce developer.

Part 3 of a 3-part series (Return to Part 2)

RON: Let's go ahead and move on to the next section here where we're talking about the ease of use, utilizing why headless is efficient, why it's effective, and why would we do this? Why wouldn't we just go grab an off-the-shelf auction platform? We talked about some of the benefits of the channel here, right, and being able to go omnichannel and multi-device, which made a lot of sense. So now let's dive in a little further and talk about the efficiency of starting with a platform that already has the building blocks, already has the Legos pre-built.  
 
CHRIS: Absolutely. If you can imagine starting with a vehicle—using the vehicle analogy—that is all one piece of metal. The body, the interior or the chassis, every single part that can be fused together is one piece of metal. That might be really efficient from a cost perspective. But as you adapt that vehicle and grow and need to use it for other things, you will outgrow that non-flexible, very rigid framework that you have. And that's fundamentally what happens with software as businesses grow.  

The bottom line is the eCommerce auction platform is meant to serve and designed to serve the business and the end-users, not the other way around. And a lot of businesses end up serving their software and they don't even realize it. It's just  like this natural progression for them, but they end up having to change their entire business model. 

I can literally tell you, there's got to be like a hundred different entrepreneurs and business owners that I've met with and talked with, that have spent millions of dollars on products that are just too rigid, and they end up getting stuck and painted into a corner and have to start completely from scratch because it was too rigid. 

No system is perfect. The architectural model for a headless commerce solution, though, is that things are not tied together so rigidly, and this gives you flexibility. As long as we play our cards right, we can get the benefits of having rigidity in the sense that we have an opinion, and it's an opinion that's based on data and analysis and a feedback loop of the industry of what works really well. But we can easily go change it.  

Decoupled and headless eCommerce is really the best of both worlds because, as long as you can easily go change it—and extend that same functionality into other mediums and not have to redo everything in order to do that—this is a really powerful framework. Think about the idea the car analogy, you have this very rigid framework. Well, if it's too rigid, then you're not going to be able to clone it and use it in another arena. With a lot of platforms that are monolithic, they basically have everything tied together and married together so tightly coupled, the UI is tied so heavily to the business logic, the UI is tied so heavily to the business logic, you can't have an omnichannel capability without redoing almost everything because there's this dependency built into the headless solution.  

And it's expecting certain things and it's just not able to handle a scenario where you have multiple different uses for the same API. And so, that again, is just one of these exercises that we've consistently gone through over the last decade. Building and massaging in these capabilities for omnichannel, really being able to do cross-origin resource sharing, and fully faithful execute on headless eCommerce solutions for auctions.

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RON: You and I were talking, and it was a couple of years ago, and we were looking at a couple of competitor products, and I was griping to you about one of our auction software developers going through and ripping out and replacing one of the technology stacks for one of the modules that we had in our platform. I'm like, “Why do we keep changing? Why do we have to do that?” And you showed me one of our competitor’s products and you opened it up and they were running fifteen year old classic ASP eCommerce code, and you said, “This is why right here.” 

It was almost exactly what you just said. It's like they've run this code and they haven't changed for the last fifteen years, and they cannot change like we can. Because we built in this modular format, we don't like the seats in the car anymore, we want to switch to leather, so we're just going to rip the seats out and switch to leather. And that's going from eComemrce AngularJS to the new version of JS, or swapping out from Angular to React or whatever. We're constantly making changes to technology and improving as the industry, and as new features, and as things change and requirements change, and more experiences change.  

[Consider] AI, right? We have a module for AI in eCommerce now. Why do we have that? Well, because the market's starting to need things that start more intelligently telling you, “Hey, these other types of auctions are actions similar to what you did,” or, “These other auctions are the most recent auctions selling the same item you're looking at,” Or, “These other auctions are coming up for sale in the next thirty minutes and you, in your scout, said you're interested in these types of things and to automatically notify you.” 

As the business changes and as needs change—I mean, we don't have ESP, we're not mind readers. We can only plan so much into the future. But I hear you say almost every time we talk, you have to plan three to five years out. Well, how do you plan for three to five years out if you have no idea? I mean, COVID just changed the entire world. Nobody saw that coming, right? That changed the whole world. And how did we succeed and work through COVID and grow through COVID?  

Well, that's because the way we set up our business, we set it up. Even though we've been in business many, many years, we act like a startup company because we planned for change. And so the most important point of this is, when you look at a platform, make sure that that platform is architected for change, make sure it's architected for growth. You don't want to go buy a platform that's written in classic ASP eCommerce that hasn't been updated in fifteen years, that, three years from now, when a requirement comes in that you need, they're like, “Sorry, you're going to have to rip and replace that,” and you spent half a million dollars over the last three years implementing this thing, and now you have to rip and replace the whole entire thing. That would be a worst-case scenario, right? 

CHRIS: Yeah, that's right. And, and this is really cool. One of the things that we see all the time is that clients have great success with their auction platforms and their eCommerce functionality in general. And then they want to move to a mobile application, work with partners, maybe do some really adaptive advertising where they want to dynamically present ads, and they need that data to be presented to these ad platforms. The list goes on. There's so much fun and excitement going on, and you really need to look for a partner.  

This space is just burgeoning and growing and just massively expanding. So, look for a partner who has your best interest in mind over the long term. And they're making those investments internally. Headless eCommerce, and in particular, decoupled eCommerce for auctions, is absolutely a requirement. We just encourage you to think of it that way and just understand that this is another piece of the equation that's really going to help you down the road to work with the software platform that's going to serve your business and your customers, as opposed to you having to change your entire business and customers be frustrated by your types of auction software.  
 
So I think that's a great ending point for this one run. What an exciting thing to get to offer all of these opportunities to our clients. If you guys have any questions and you want to find out more, feel free to hit us up in the comments. Of course you can reach out to us via our website. We offer complimentary discoveries, and this is a great way, if you're interested—and it's not going to cost you anything—to just find out more and see if there's an opportunity for us to go out and point you in the right direction, or potentially work together. We'd love to hear from you about your needs for online auction platforms.
 
RON: Totally agree. Head to Clarity-Ventures.com to schedule a demo. I'll jump on a call with you and see if we can help you out. Thanks for your attention today. Smash that like button if you appreciated today's video, and we'll see you on the next one. Bye for now.  

CHRIS: Thanks. Bye for now.