An increasing number of customer touchpoints (or gateways that control the access to consumers, depending on the perspective), impatient demand-everything shoppers, the need for new business models across most industries and deep-pocketed and tech-savvy young competitors - this all has led brands, retailers and manufactures to re-think (e)commerce.

As with every movement in the field of technology and business where there is a lot of money on the table you don’t have to wait long until the first buzzwords arise and take over. The most relevant to mention are terms like Headless, APIs, Cloud-native, Microservices, Monolith and so on. They are often mixed up, misunderstood and/or used wrongly (and obviously they are not sharp enough defined so everybody can claim them). As there are some dependencies (a headless commerce platform automatically comes with APIs) this article will only cover the history, background and development of headless commerce platforms (even though some also focus on microservices or a cloud-offering).