[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":28},["ShallowReactive",2],{"lBWg8wJfu1":3},{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"excerpt":7,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":9,"page_content":10,"featured_image":18,"fields":19,"tags":20,"published":24,"published_at":25,"created_at":26,"updated_at":27},"3e1b5ff2-28a8-4ce3-907c-5bc129c9ca45","notes/moving-from-bigcommerce-to-a-headless-cms","Moving from BigCommerce to a headless setup","BigCommerce is one of the few SaaS platforms actually built to go headless, so the real question is rarely how to escape it. It is whether you keep it as the backend or leave it entirely. Here is how I decide.","Moving from BigCommerce to a Headless Setup","BigCommerce is built for headless, so the real choice is keep it as the backend or leave entirely. How each works, the checkout catch, and which to pick.",{"blocks":11},[12],{"id":13,"data":14,"type":17},"bc660559-5f3c-4a6d-aca3-823398a82f40",{"content":15,"maxWidth":16},"\u003Cp>I have written about moving off Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace and Wix, and each one has its own particular pain. BigCommerce is the odd one out, and in a good way. It is one of the very few hosted platforms that was actually designed with headless in mind, so the honest starting point is different: for a lot of BigCommerce stores, going headless does not mean leaving BigCommerce at all.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2>BigCommerce is built to go headless\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>Where Wix hands you almost nothing and Squarespace gives you a thin export, BigCommerce has leaned into headless for years. It markets itself as open SaaS, and behind that there is a real GraphQL Storefront API, a solid set of REST management APIs for your catalogue and orders, and even their own reference headless storefront. The upshot is that you can build a completely custom front end on Nuxt or Next and let BigCommerce keep doing the thing it is genuinely good at: holding your products, prices, inventory and orders, and running a hosted, PCI-compliant checkout you do not have to build or secure yourself.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So the question I ask a BigCommerce client is not the one I ask a Wix client. It is not \u003Cstrong>how do we get your content out\u003C/strong>. It is \u003Cstrong>do you actually want to leave, or do you just want a better front end?\u003C/strong> Those are two very different projects, and people call both of them a migration.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2>Two projects that both get called migration\u003C/h2>\u003Cul>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Go headless, keep BigCommerce as the backend.\u003C/strong> You build a new front end against the Storefront API and keep the commerce engine where it is. This is the common path, and the lower-risk one.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Leave BigCommerce entirely.\u003C/strong> You move products, customers and order history onto a different stack. This is a bigger job with real data and payment-gateway work, and you only take it on for a real reason.\u003C/li>\u003C/ul>\u003Ch2>The common path: headless on top of BigCommerce\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>Most stores that come to me are not unhappy with BigCommerce as a commerce engine. They are unhappy with how the storefront looks, how it performs, or how little control they have over the markup and the content around the products. Headless fixes exactly that without touching the part that works.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>In practice that means a Nuxt or Next front end pulling products and categories from the Storefront GraphQL API, a headless CMS holding the pages, posts and campaign content that a pure commerce platform is bad at, and BigCommerce still owning the cart and checkout. You can embed their hosted checkout or hand off to it, which means you are not on the hook for PCI compliance or rebuilding the single most sensitive part of an online shop. You get the speed and the control of a custom front end, and you keep the boring, reliable commerce plumbing. For a lot of businesses that is the whole win, and it is a fraction of the cost and risk of a full replatform.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2>If you really are leaving\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>Sometimes the platform itself is the problem. The pricing has moved somewhere that no longer makes sense for your volume, you have hit a genuine limit in how the catalogue or promotions work, or you want to own the full stack end to end. That is a fair reason to leave, but be clear-eyed about it.\u003C/p>\u003Cul>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Data.\u003C/strong> Products, variants, customers and order history all need to come out through the API and go into the new system in a shape it understands. This is scriptable and usually clean, because unlike the closed builders BigCommerce gives you proper API access to your own data.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Checkout and payments.\u003C/strong> This is the part you were getting for free. Leaving means standing up your own checkout and re-integrating your payment gateway, which is the biggest chunk of the work and the part to test hardest.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Everything BigCommerce did quietly.\u003C/strong> Tax rules, shipping zones, discount logic, email receipts. Write them down before you start, because they are easy to forget until launch week.\u003C/li>\u003C/ul>\u003Ch2>Redirects and SEO, same as always\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>Whichever route you take, if the URLs change you map every old one to its new home and put 301 redirects in. This is where stores throw away rankings in a migration, and it is entirely avoidable. If you go headless but keep your URL structure, you can often carry your SEO across almost untouched, which is another quiet argument for the keep-the-backend path.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2>Which one you actually want\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>My rule of thumb: if your gripe is the storefront, go headless and keep BigCommerce. If your gripe is BigCommerce itself, then plan a proper replatform and budget for the checkout work. Most people who think they need the second one actually need the first. The reason BigCommerce is a nicer starting point than \u003Ca href=\"/notes/what-a-shopify-to-headless-migration-actually-involves\">Shopify\u003C/a> or the closed builders is simply that it was built to be taken apart this way.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The bigger principle behind all of this is \u003Ca href=\"/notes/own-your-ecommerce-platform\">owning your ecommerce platform\u003C/a> rather than renting your whole shopfront, and the most involved version of the story is \u003Ca href=\"/notes/why-i-moved-from-magento-to-headless\">why I moved off Magento\u003C/a>. If you are weighing up a BigCommerce store and want a straight answer on whether to go headless or leave, that is the kind of call I help with on the \u003Ca href=\"/services\">services\u003C/a> side.\u003C/p>","lg","wysiwyg","",{},[21,22,23],"headless","migration","ecommerce",true,"2026-09-10T08:00:00+00:00","2026-07-03T07:15:00+00:00","2026-09-10T08:00:02.418684+00:00",1789027255975]