For most online retailers, the commerce backend is no longer the problem. Platforms like Shopify handle checkout, payments, inventory and tax to a standard most teams wouldn’t want to rebuild themselves.

The bottleneck has moved to the storefront. The layer customers actually see, touch and judge in the first two seconds. And on a templated, monolithic frontend, that layer has a ceiling: Ceilings on speed, ceilings on design, ceilings on personalisation, and ceilings on what AI agents can read when they show up to shop on a customer’s behalf.

That’s why a growing wave of high-growth brands is going headless: Keeping their commerce platform as the engine, and rebuilding the storefront on a separate, faster, more flexible frontend layer. The Headless Commerce Market report found that 73 per cent of businesses now use headless architecture, with 98 per cent of non-users planning to evaluate it within 12 months. The global market is projected to grow from US$1.74 billion in 2025 to $7.16 billion by 2032.

For Australian retailers, the shift lines up with what KPMG’s Australian Retail Outlook 2025 already flagged: 42 per cent of Australian shoppers are now omnichannel, and the monolithic platforms most stores were built on weren’t designed to deliver the seamless, cross-channel experience those shoppers expect.

Why leading retailers run their headless storefront on Vercel

The headless shift is real, but it surfaces a new question: What do you build the storefront on?

For a growing share of high-performing retailers, the answer is Vercel. The platform was purpose-built for fast, modern frontends, and it pairs cleanly with the commerce backends most teams already run, including Shopify, BigCommerce, commercetools and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. The customer proof points span industries.

American denim brand PAIGE rebuilt its storefront on Next.js and Vercel and saw a 76 per cent increase in conversion rates and a 22 per cent jump in Black Friday revenue. Online rug retailer Ruggable migrated from a custom Liquid theme to a headless setup on Vercel and reported 300 per cent more organic clicks, a 75 per cent increase in search rankings and 40 per cent faster site speed, with zero downtime through Black Friday weekend.

The performance ceiling effectively disappears. Headless commerce architectures typically deliver 20 per cent to 50 per cent faster page loads than their traditional counterparts, and every one-second improvement in load time is worth around 2 per cent in conversion.

Vercel has been partnering with global retailers, including Carhartt and Bombas, and Australian brands like David Jones and Petbarn, for years on fast, composable commerce. For teams considering a headless move on Shopify or any other platform, here are five capabilities worth knowing about:

A starting point that isn’t from scratch: Next.js Commerce is a free, production-ready headless storefront that teams can deploy in minutes. It comes pre-wired with fast product pages, checkout integration, SEO and live inventory updates, with first-class support for Shopify and other major commerce backends. There’s no need to invent the architecture or rebuild patterns that thousands of stores already run in production.

Performance built into the platform: Vercel’s global edge network serves product pages from the location closest to each shopper. With Incremental Static Regeneration, pages stay cached for instant delivery and revalidate the moment a product changes in the commerce backend, so pricing and inventory stay accurate without slowing the site down.

Composable freedom: Headless on Vercel makes it straightforward to plug in best-of-breed services for content, search, reviews, personalisation and analytics. Teams can swap pieces in or out as needs change, rather than being locked into a single platform’s ecosystem.

Edge personalisation and experimentation: Routing Middleware lets retailers run A/B tests, localise experiences by region and personalise pages without slowing the site. Global brand Lift Foils used this approach to handle a 200 per cent traffic spike after going viral, while serving localised content across regions.

An AI-ready foundation: As we covered in our previous piece on agentic commerce, AI agents need fast, machine-readable storefronts. A headless store on Vercel exposes the structured product data agents query, and Vercel’s AI SDK and Chat SDK give teams the toolkit to build their own shopping assistants on top.

The path most retailers are taking

The retailers winning right now aren’t choosing between a templated platform and a custom build. They’re keeping the commerce backend that works, and pairing it with a frontend that’s fast, flexible and ready for whatever comes next.

For most teams, that frontend is Next.js on Vercel. The combination is well-documented, well-trodden, and increasingly the default among the brands setting the pace in Australian and global retail.

If your team is starting to feel the limits of the templated storefront layer, the path forward has never been clearer.

• Learn more about building composable commerce on Vercel or get started with the Next.js Commerce template.