Is Going Headless Right For You? Part 3 - Ben Kennedy

You've decided that going headless with your Shopify or e-commerce store is the best option for growing your brand and company, you've learned how headless builds can be tailor made to fit the needs of you and your customers, now's the time to figure out who you're going to choose as a service provider. Yes, you could hire a team of developers, or rely entirely on your own in-house team if they have the skills, but chances are your staff aren't experts on Shopify app building, or ecosystem integration, or any of the various aspects and problems that could arise in trying to develop a headless approach yourself, and any new, specialized hires will cost far more than contracting out one of the many services available. Here's what you need to know about picking your headless platform.

Why should I choose Shogun as my provider?  For Ben and The Feed, Shogun seemed like the best option available due to its balance of offered features and off-your-hands reliability. This allows them to be as invested in the details of their headless build as little or much as they want to or need to be, with direct control over nearly any aspect of their headless build when they feel something needs to be changed, or carefree disregard and trust that it will be maintained and operational when they need to focus on other aspects of their business. 

Other providers tend to choose one side of that balance over the other, either giving companies the tools they need and more or less walking away, or custom development and retaining control over the build, with any changes having to be brought to the company and applied how they see fit. 

Only Shogun allows you full control over your code base, while giving you a worry free customer experience, allowing you to focus on what you're good at and what you want to build, while trusting and relying on Shogun to be good at what they're good at, and build what they want to build. 

How long does it take to implement, from decision to live? How fast or how slow it takes you and your site to go from choosing to go headless to launching your build very much depends on your familiarity with the technology, how clear your plan of attack is, how focussed you are on your goals, and how comfortable you are with the finished product once it's delivered. 

For Ben and The Feed, it was a brief three months in total, which may be considered an atypically speedy rate of return, thanks to factors like high technical familiarity.  Your build won't happen overnight, nor should it, considering the data driven decisions you'll have to make about how you implement your build. 

Be patient, be careful, it will take time but it will payoff in the long run.

How much should going headless cost? In the end it's all about making you more money, and while you have to spend money to make money, there's a fine line between spending and wasting. How do you know you're actually paying a fair price for your provider? If you consider your store as your virtual retail space, a physical store rendered as ones and zeroes, you can get a better sense of the importance of investing in it. If you owned a traditional brick and mortar shop, you wouldn't hesitate to make sure the door worked, the windows were clean, the floor didn't have holes in it, etc etc. Approach improving your site the same way; you're not just buying an expensive blog, this is your store, your business, and it deserves investment.

You'll have many cost considerations going into a headless build; first your provider, who may be pricier than other do-it-yourself options, but will be well worth every penny spent when chosen with care. Second is an in-house expert, either someone you train up or hire, who can be your direct hand in operating the build (training is cheaper, but hiring gets you a better outcome). 

Depending on your provider, what you ask of them, and your in-house team, this can cost anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, no small chunk of change, so be very sure what you want and what you need before dropping a single dime.

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