As an e-commerce manager, one of your many goals is hitting conversion targets with a next-level customer experience. Popular eCommerce platforms for retail goods have traditionally offered out of the box UIs which enable retailers to undertake a level of cosmetic customisations or theming but is fundamentally constrained in shaping the overall shopping experience. Complicating matters further, to thrive in the IoT era, you need to embrace selling your branded content on new touch points and inside different apps. The way forward for e-commerce is headless.
To put it simply, headless commerce refers to platform architecture where the front-end customer experience is decoupled from back-end commerce components (e.g. shopping cart, promotions). Instead, commerce functionality is exposed through individual APIs that enable developers to build UIs for multiple touch points and channels.
Headless eCommerce is rising in popularity. You may have already been thinking of implementing solutions such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Hybris, Shopify Plus and BigCommerce. These are all powerful, agile and scalable platforms which, when used in a headless approach, enable you to completely customise your shopping experience.
Benefits with headless commerce
So why is headless so popular?
- Revenue-generating opportunities – For retailers with multiple touch points, outlets or marketplace partners, coupled architecture implies refactoring or otherwise compromising on experience. In headless, digital products are abstracted: pieces such as business logic and session management remain back-end, whilst the front-end paints and renders products dynamically. Thus as an ancillary or digital retail manager, you can have greater control over your non-airline products, as well as extend and manage the context in which these branded products are displayed and sold.
- Unified experiences – In headless, one or multiple backend solutions are orchestrated through one or multiple APIs. This simplification means that rather than maintaining separate touch points, you build, manage and deliver a unified shopping experience.
- Technical agility – The most obvious and direct benefit of headless commerce is the agility and flexibility afforded in a more open architecture. Changes and experience enhancements can be rolled out across the front-end without impacting the back-end, and vice versa. What this means for digital retailing teams is that the commerce solution can more easily adapt to incorporate new and emergent tech or other experience enhancements.
- Agile go-to-market – With headless, not only is the development speed-to-market accelerated by using, but the way you approach solution delivery can shift to become more agile. Headless fits naturally with the prioritisation decisions necessary in product development, as the inherent flexibility of the approach affords a more gradual product ramp up instead of targeting a massive release. For example, by adopting a headless strategy, a Branchspace client was able to build a scalable and extensible digital commerce platform to carry them through their rapid MVP phase to launch, and beyond.
In short, the headless approach enables brands of any size or maturity to design next-gen retail and future-proof their commerce platforms.
Opportunities in travel
In the travel industry, airlines in particular have a unique opportunity to build high-value goods stores for their customers, enabled through headless. A traveller heading to Tenerife for the weekend may end up buying sunscreen and sunglasses in duty-free shops. Which begs the question––why shouldn’t these items be purchasable from an airline website?
For many airlines, pre-flight is still an area of untapped potential revenue. For the past few years, digital teams have turned greater attention to their experience and embraced the concept of becoming a retailer of the travel experience. With headless commerce, airlines can sell products from their retail goods stores to their passengers, no matter where they are. So the passenger taking a taxi to the airport can make the most of their time stuck in traffic and buy the swimming briefs and beach towel they forgot to pack, all from their trusted airline.
A headless-first solution
At Branchspace, we’re no strangers to headless commerce. From our work with airlines and travel retailers, we’ve seen firsthand the challenges digital teams encounter when trying to implement new technologies and optimise their storefronts. One of their main challenges rests around building out a unique portfolio of mixed products and adding new touch points, while maintaining and delivering a unified customer experience. To do just that, we helped one of our clients implement a headless e-commerce platform by leveraging BigCommerce and dotCMS to build a new redemption shopping experience for their loyalty users.
In another recent project, our client wanted to implement a forward-thinking digital ecosystem and expand their retail touch points. To do so, they needed a headless approach leveraging a flexible e-commerce platform like Triplake, our in-house digital commerce platform. By embracing headless, our client has enabled an agile and scalable framework that grows with their digital needs and takes travel retail to the next level.
The average airline web portals is not broken. It loads, it sells tickets. It technically does what it's supposed to do.
And yet, the experience feels tiring.
You notice it when you try to do something simple. Change a seat. Find your gate. Understand what happens if a flight is delayed. Suddenly you are scanning long pages, decoding airline terminology, clicking back and forth just to stay oriented.
The problem is not with the features, It is effort effort required in getting from A to B.
Airline portals still expect travellers to think like systems. To understand menus, categories, fare families, ancillaries, rules. But travellers arrive with something much simpler. Intent.
They want to get something done and get on with their journey.
This article posits that airline web portals should stop behaving like navigation systems and start acting as intent-aware decision environments. When UX is designed to reduce effort, adapt to context, and quietly support travellers at each stage of the journey, portals become calmer to use, easier to trust, and far more effective for airlines.
The basics still matter more than airlines think
Before talking about AI or personalisation, it is worth being honest about the fundamentals.
You can see that accessibility standards aren’t yet being applied and portals aren’t optimised for mobile, which results in performance drops. Navigation feels heavier than it needs to be. Search often works, but only if you already know what to ask and how the airline expects you to ask it.
These are not exciting topics, but they shape everything that comes after. If a portal is slow, confusing, or inaccessible, no amount of intelligence layered on top will fix the experience.
At Branchspace, we see this repeatedly. Airlines want to move faster, personalise more, experiment. But the UX foundation is not always ready to support that ambition.
Where portals lose traveller trust
The biggest UX issues are rarely dramatic, they are subtle and cumulative:
- A vague error message that offers no next step
- A long paragraph that hides the one thing the traveller needs to know
- Three different words for the same concept depending on where you are in the journey
- A mobile page that technically works but feels endless
In isolation these are small instances, but they compound to create friction for a user. And friction erodes confidence.
Travellers begin to hesitate, scan more carefully, and spend extra effort just trying to stay oriented. They stop trusting that the portal will help them when things go wrong. Good UX goes beyond delight, it is about reassurance.
Decision-making is the real job of UX
Every airline portal is a decision-making environment:
- Choose a flight
- Choose a fare
- Choose a seat
- Decide whether to rebook or wait
The role of UX is not to present all options equally. It is to reduce the mental work required to choose well.
That is where simple principles matter more than flashy ideas: clear visual hierarchy, familiar patterns, plain language, and progressive disclosure.
When these are done properly, travellers stop analysing the interface and start moving confidently through it.
This is also where intent-led thinking becomes powerful. When portals are designed around tasks rather than pages, complexity begins to fall away naturally.
What changes when you design for intent
When you stop designing for navigation and start designing for intent, the portal behaves differently:
- Shift the focus to intent and the portal begins to respond in new ways
- Search leads the experience rather than sitting in the background
- Logged-in travellers with an upcoming trip see what they can do next, instead of being asked to explore
This is the direction we have been taking with platforms like Triplake by allowing the portal to respond to context, trip stage, loyalty status and behaviour.
Where AI actually helps and where it should stay quiet
AI has a role in airline UX, but it works best when it stays in the background rather than taking centre stage. The strongest AI-driven experiences are often the ones you barely notice, because the interface feels simpler and the path forward feels clearer.
That might mean routing a traveller straight to the right outcome based on a natural language query, or surfacing the most relevant rebooking option when a disruption occurs. In other moments, it is about removing repetition altogether, using known preferences to spare travellers from making the same choices again and again.
At its best, AI offers clarity, supports decisions without trying to make them on the traveller’s behalf. People still want to feel in control of their journey, they just do not want to work so hard to get there.
The portal is becoming a living interface
The most interesting shift we are seeing has very little to do with technology and everything to do with behaviour. Airline portals are gradually moving away from being static websites and towards adaptive interfaces that respond to where a traveller is in their journey.
Before the trip, the portal helps you prepare. On the day of travel, it shifts into a supportive role, surfacing the information that matters most in the moment. Afterwards, it follows up, closing the loop rather than simply ending the experience.
Making this work demands modular design systems, flexible platforms, and teams that think beyond individual pages and flows. It is not an easy change, but it is both achievable and increasingly necessary.
