This is part 2 of a two-article series on headless ecommerce. The first article described how headless ecommerce works, where the front end that a customer interfaces with is decoupled from the back-end ecommerce solution, and the two are connected via an API interface.
In this article, we will explore how Service Objects products can power your headless ecommerce solution, using contact data validation and other capabilities.
Headless ecommerce: a quick recap
As we discussed in the previous article, headless ecommerce involves decoupling the front-end presentation layer of ecommerce applications from the back-end that manages all commerce functionality – connecting them both via an API layer.
The point of headless ecommerce? By completely separating the front end, it becomes much easier to move into different ecommerce channels: websites, mobile, voice-activated internet devices, IoT devices such as Amazon’s Dash buttons, and more. Of course, this often means “bringing your own” interface – but with the right development resources, it can enable true omnichannel support, and better responsiveness to new market trends and customer touch points.
How Service Objects can optimize ecommerce
Nowhere is the term “garbage in, garbage out” more accurate than in ecommerce. Bad data can have serious consequences in terms of lost sales, mis-delivered orders, poor customer satisfaction, fraud and more. So engineering data quality into your ecommerce front-end is more critical than ever. Plus, we can automate critical functions such as tax calculation, to speed your development even faster.
Here are some of the key capabilities you can engineer into your headless solution:
Content customization: At the point of data entry, you can detect a customer’s location using our DOTS IP Address Validation product, or gain demographic information about this customer’s location such as age, ethnic or socioeconomic data using DOTS Demographics Plus. Both kinds of data can help you specifically target your messaging for more effective content marketing at the point of sale.
Customer quality validation: Our DOTS Lead Validation and DOTS Order Validation products take contact data, validate and cross-check it against over 100 data points, and return a quantitative quality score from 0-100 as well as a great deal of specific quality data. This helps you assess lead and customer quality, ensure all elements of a contact or order record are genuine and accurate, and keep fraudulent or bogus transactions from reaching the order acceptance stage.
Contact data validation: Our flagship DOTS Address Validation product ensures the accuracy of your customer addresses, preventing delivery issues and customer satisfaction problems. This can also help prevent credit card fraud by helping you flag and review situations where billing address details do not match the customer’s credit card address.
Other contact data validation tools can be used to check email and telephone data. DOTS Email Validation helps ensure email contact accuracy, and can be particularly important when you are delivering digital assets/products. DOTS GeoPhone, DOTS GeoPhone Plus and DOTS Phone Append can provide reverse lookup for verification, validate line types for telemarketing compliance, or append missing phone numbers.
Sales tax calculation: Sales and use tax rates can literally vary from block to block in some metropolitan areas, and DOTS FastTax can automate these calculations for customer addresses in the USA and Canada.
Credit card validation: DOTS BIN Validation uses a global database to identify a card’s issuing financial institution, country of issue and card type. This data can be cross-referenced with customer details to significantly reduce the risk of fraud.
Going headless without losing your head
Headless ecommerce is a growing trend, fueled by rapid change and an increasing variety of customer touchpoints. Who would have guessed just a few years ago that we’d be asking Alexa to re-order toilet paper, ordering our next car from an app, or pressing a button on an IoT device?
On the other hand, data quality is more critical than ever in a headless world – otherwise, orders can go to the wrong place, contact data can be incomplete or inaccurate, fraudsters can take advantage of your system, and more. And you can substantially boost your ROI by using this contact data for targeted point-of-sale marketing. That’s where our tools come in: we help ensure your front end delivers data that is genuine, accurate and up-to-date, and leverage this data for better business intelligence.
