AUTHOR
Technical Project Manager at Lucent Commerce. 8 posts, newest first.
The population of stores that needed headless got smaller over the past year, not bigger, because the platform closed the gap that used to justify most of the builds. Looking back, the group that was left is small.
Which system a product is born in decides more about your integration than which connector you buy. Most stores with a real ERP should be ERP-first, and a good number of them should not.
The shortlist matters less than the four decisions underneath it, and the first one is whether you need a CMS at all.
Partial headless is a legitimate destination, but it is three different architectures wearing one name, and only one of them is cheap. The cart decides which you can have.
Server or edge is the wrong first question. What decides the page is how many requests have to reach the Storefront API at all, and which ones must never be cached.
How to cache Shopify Storefront API queries: long for the catalog, deliberate for price and stock, never for customer data. Covers Hydrogen strategies.
Most stores asking the question have a theme problem or an app problem. Both are cheaper to fix, and both are reversible.
Webhooks are how most Shopify integrations hear about orders. They can also arrive more than once, out of order, and sometimes not at all.
NEXT STEP
A senior Shopify engineer reviews your storefront, theme performance and checkout, then sends a prioritized list of fixes.
