ArticleIntroductionText

Choosing the best CMS for your e-commerce business is a strategic decision. The right content management system can help you move faster, create better customer experiences, and scale without friction.

Text

<p>In this guide, we’ll discuss what to look for in a CMS built for modern commerce, from ease of use to integration and scalability.&nbsp;</p>
<p>You’ll also get a downloadable comparison of five top headless platforms — Contentful, Sanity, Prismic, Payload, and ButterCMS — to help you choose the right fit for your needs.</p>
<p>Short on time? <a href="https://mirumee.com/blog/how-to-choose-best-headless-cms-for-ecommerce#headless-cms-comparison-guide-for-e-commerce" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_self">Skip straight to the downloadable CMS comparison table.</a></p>


<h2>PIM vs. CMS - Which One Do You Need?</h2>

<p>A Product Information Management (PIM) is built for structure.&nbsp;</p><p>It handles product specs, SKUs, pricing, inventory, translations — everything you need to keep a catalog accurate and scalable.&nbsp;</p><p>If you're running a performance-driven store with a large or complex product range (like industrial parts or a marketplace), a solid PIM can cover your content needs.</p><p>But structured data only gets you so far.</p><p>You'll need a CMS if you're building a brand, running campaigns, or creating personalized shopping experiences.</p>

<h3><strong>When Do You Need a CMS in E-Commerce?</strong></h3>

<p>A Content Management System helps you:</p><ul><li>Create landing pages, buying guides, and campaign content;</li><li>Localize messaging by market, language, or customer segment;</li><li>Let marketing teams publish content without waiting for devs;</li><li>Deliver consistent brand storytelling across channels;</li><li>Launch and manage content on the website, mobile, in-store displays, and more.</li></ul><p><span style="background-color: rgb(240, 193, 112);">In short, PIM handles the data while CMS brings it to life.&nbsp;</span></p><p>For modern e-commerce businesses looking to scale and connect with customers on a deeper level, those two systems often work best together.</p>

Image

<p>Traditional CMS platforms like WordPress were built for a simpler time—one website, one screen, one stack. But commerce doesn’t live on a single channel anymore.</p><p>Customers move across websites, apps, marketplaces, and in-store touchpoints. And they expect a consistent, personalized experience at every step.</p><p>A headless CMS separates content from how and where it’s displayed. So you can manage it in one place and push it out to various channels. It’s how modern teams power product stories, campaigns, and landing pages -&nbsp; all from a single source of truth.</p><p>With headless, you get flexibility, speed, and scale — without getting boxed in.</p><p>Content isn’t tied to one page anymore. It’s headless, it’s composable, and it goes wherever your customers are.</p>

<h2>5 Key Features for Choosing a Headless CMS for E-Commerce</h2>

<p>Marketing teams need CMS they can actually use - without pinging developers every time they want to test a new form or customize a landing page.&nbsp;</p>

<ul><li>A CMS with a simple, easy-to-use interface that lets non-technical users create, edit, and publish content independently and without touching code.</li><li>Features like visual editing, live previews, drag-and-drop functionality, and collaboration tools are a big plus.</li></ul>

<ul><li>Less back-and-forth with developers.&nbsp;</li><li>Faster launch cycles for promotions, seasonal campaigns, or new product lines.&nbsp;</li><li>And a team that can respond to market shifts or customer feedback without delays.</li></ul>

<h3>2. Scalability and High Performance</h3>

<p>E-commerce traffic is seasonal (holiday sales) and often may be unpredictable (viral influencer promotions). Your CMS needs to handle those spikes without blinking.</p>

<p>A headless CMS built on a scalable, cloud-native backend and infrastructure that supports auto-scaling, CDN delivery, and decoupled architecture. So content can be delivered quickly, even at scale.</p>

<ul><li>No slowdowns or crashes during high-traffic events.&nbsp;</li><li>Smooth performance across your storefront and marketing sites.</li><li>And peace of mind that your content infrastructure won’t sabotage your growth.</li></ul>

<h3>3. Seamless E-Commerce Integration</h3>

<p>Content lives alongside products, pricing, inventory, and customer data. If your CMS doesn’t integrate well with the rest of your stack, things can get messy quickly.</p>

<ul><li>Strong API support and native integrations with your e-commerce platform, CRM, PIM, and marketing tools. </li><li>It's great if it supports webhooks or pre-built connectors to reduce custom developers' work.</li></ul>

<ul><li>Clean, connected workflows where marketers can enrich product pages with content directly from the CMS.&nbsp;</li><li>No more copy-pasting or duplicate updates. Just synced data across every touchpoint and faster delivery of new features.</li></ul>

<p>Customers move between channels constantly - website, mobile app, email, social media, and even in-store displays. Inconsistent content creates confusion and hurts your brand.</p>

<p>You need a CMS with strong omnichannel delivery via APIs. It should let you manage content in one place and distribute it to every channel you need.&nbsp;</p>

<ul><li>Consistent messaging and up-to-date product info across every channel.</li><li>Marketers can launch unified campaigns that span web, mobile, and social—all from a single content hub.&nbsp;</li><li>As new channels emerge, your CMS will be ready to support them.</li></ul>

<h3>5. Personalization and Content Targeting Capabilities</h3>

<p>Customers expect a <a href="https://mirumee.com/blog/personalization-is-the-future-of-ecommerce?utm_campaign=composable_pillar&amp;utm_medium=internal&amp;utm_source=art_how_to_choose_headless_cms_for_ecommerce_intext" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">personalized shopping experience</a>. Targeted content improves engagement, drives conversions, and helps your brand stand out in crowded markets.</p>

<p>Support for personalization out-of-the-box or easy integration with CDPs and personalization engines. You should be able to customize messaging, layouts, or offers based on location, behavior, or customer segments.</p>

<ul><li>Region-specific promos, smarter product recommendations, and dynamic content that adjusts based on user data.&nbsp;</li><li>Your marketing team will be able to build campaigns that feel more relevant and convert better without heavy dev support.</li></ul>

<h2>Monthly Fees Don’t Define Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)</h2>

<p>In most CMS comparison charts, you're bombarded with metrics: monthly price, page speed, API limits, storage size, user seats, and more. They're all important but tend to be isolated numbers that don't tell the whole story.</p><p>TCO isn't another metric to compare—it's the lens through which all the other metrics start to make sense. </p>

<h3>TCO Includes All The Costs Associated With Your CMS Over Time:</h3>

<ul><li>Developer time and resources (setup, customization, integrations);</li><li>Ongoing maintenance and support;</li><li>Content migration or re-platforming costs;</li><li>Training and onboarding for your team;</li><li>Infrastructure costs (especially for self-hosted or open-source platforms);</li><li>Potential costs tied to performance issues, downtime, or lack of scalability.</li></ul>

<p>So, when choosing a CMS, don't ask only, "<em>What's the monthly fee?</em>" Instead, ask, "<em>What will this actually cost us over the next 1–3 years—in time, effort, and missed opportunities?"</em></p>

<h2>Headless CMS Comparison Guide for E-Commerce</h2>

<p>With so many CMS options on the market, finding the right one can feel overwhelming.&nbsp;</p><p>We’ve compared five top CMS platforms—<strong>Contentful, Payload, ButterCMS, Sanity, and Prismic</strong>—focusing on features that matter for e-commerce businesses.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p>Download the comparison to see which fits you best and make a wise decision.</p>

Core:Button

<h2>Mirumee’s Headless CMS Recommendations for E-Commerce</h2>

<p>Each CMS offers unique strengths and caters to different priorities and business needs.&nbsp;</p><ul><li><strong>Contentful</strong> excels in its enterprise-focused composable architecture and extensive feature set.&nbsp;</li><li><strong>Payload</strong> offers a highly flexible and developer-centric code-first approach, particularly well-suited for Next.js environments.&nbsp;</li><li><strong>ButterCMS </strong>stands out for its ease of use, making it a strong choice for marketing teams.&nbsp;</li><li><strong>Sanity</strong> provides exceptional flexibility through its data modeling and real-time collaboration capabilities.&nbsp;</li><li><strong>Prismic</strong> focuses on empowering marketers with its intuitive visual page builder and component-based architecture.</li></ul>

Headless CMS Recommendations for E-Commerce

<h2>The Best CMS for E-Commerce Is Not a One-Size-Fits-All Solution</h2>

<p>There is no universal winner. The “best” CMS depends on your specific requirements and strategic goals. What works perfectly for one brand might be a poor fit for another.</p><p>Some teams need full control over the front end and back end. Others want simplicity and speed to market. You might prioritize localization, headless architecture, or deep integrations with your internal systems.</p><p>It all comes down to context. The best setup is the one that aligns with you.</p>

Columns

How to Choose the Best Headless CMS for E-Commerce?

Social media notifications, live chats, dozens of browser tabs... With so many alluring online activities, it’s easy to understand why shoppers don’t want to waste time. Case in point: 70% of customers jump straight to the search bar when they enter e-commerce.

<p>Still, many of these same e-commerce sites deliver a poor search experience, failing to direct the customer to the correct items and thus losing potential sales. To create a comfortable (and profitable) experience, Search as a Service (SaaS) is often an exciting option.</p><p>In this blog post, we'll explore the key factors to consider when choosing the ideal Search-as-a-Service solution, ensuring you can provide your customers with a seamless and efficient search experience.</p>

<h2><strong>What is Search as a Service?</strong></h2>

<p>At its core, Search as a Service refers to using a third-party, cloud-based search platform that can be easily integrated into an e-commerce website or application. It's an efficient way to perform site search optimization.</p><p>Rather than building and maintaining your search infrastructure, you can leverage the capabilities of a specialized search provider to power your customers' search experience.</p>

<h2><strong>How Search as a Service Typically Works?</strong></h2>

<p>First, you provide the SaaS provider with your data, such as website content, product catalogs, documents, and application data.</p><p>The provider may offer API access, data connectors, or manual upload tools to facilitate the data integration. Some SaaS providers even have web crawlers that can automatically crawl and index your website's content.</p><p>They then use advanced search algorithms to index the data, making it organized and easy to search. Advanced techniques like Natural Language Processing (NLP), AI-powered search, synonym detection, and entity recognition are common to automatically make sense of the data.</p><p>Now that the SaaS has the data indexed, you can use the provider's search API to power up your e-commerce search backend with different parameters and filters.</p><p>The frontend layer is separate and has to be designed according to your website's visual identity. As a plus, some vendors offer helpful search pre-built search boxes, filters, and other UI components to speed up the process.</p><p>When customers search on your e-commerce site, their query is sent to the Search as a Service platform rather than processed by your servers.</p>

<p>SaaS platforms typically offer analytics and reporting tools to track search performance and user behavior. These insights allow you to fine-tune the search features and constantly optimize the customer journey.</p>

<h3><strong>A Note on Data Privacy</strong></h3>

<p>An important privacy point is that SaaS platforms don’t receive personally identifiable information from users performing queries.&nbsp;</p><p>Platforms must collect user action data to provide and improve search recommendations. However, they obtain user search terms and access tokens, maintaining user anonymity.</p><p>This practice makes complying with CCPA, GDPR, and other relevant regulations easier.</p>

Search as a Service in E-Commerce: Data Privacy

<p>Recommendations often go hand in hand with search implementation. To implement these recommendations effectively, we need to collect information about user actions, commonly called user events.</p><p>Recommendations can be generated anonymously, based on a user's current session, or non-anonymously, by collecting information from multiple sessions.</p><p>It's important to note that we never send sensitive user data to third-party services. Instead, we use a token that represents the user. This approach ensures user privacy while enabling personalized and relevant recommendations.</p>

<h2>How Search as a Service Can Revamp the E-Commerce's Search Engine</h2>

<p>E-commerce search has some unique requirements compared to other industries.&nbsp;</p><p>As mentioned before, customers want to find and purchase specific products in an online store. The search function must be highly accurate and tailored to the user's intent.</p><p>This time pressure differs from a general web search (think Google), which aims to provide the most relevant information on various topics.</p><p>Another key difference is the importance of product metadata. In e-commerce, detailed information about each product, such as descriptions, categories, and attributes, is crucial for powering an effective search experience.&nbsp;</p><p>This structured data allows the search engine to understand the products better and match them to customer queries.</p>

<h3>5 Benefits of Search as a Service in E-Commerce</h3>

<p>When it comes to potential benefits, Search as a Service can be particularly helpful in e-commerce: </p><ol><li><strong>Increased scalability and reliability</strong> - Search as a service providers are designed to scale seamlessly, ensuring that your search functionality can handle spikes in traffic and an expanding product catalog.</li><li><strong>Reduced maintenance and IT overhead</strong> - SaaS offloads the technical complexities of search, such as managing servers, optimizing indexing, and fine-tuning relevance algorithms.&nbsp;</li><li><strong>Flexibility and customization</strong> - SaaS usually allows for quick customization of many search aspects, from functionality to visuals, without hard-coding every change.</li><li><strong>Market insights </strong>- Search as a Service platforms often have access to a wealth of data and insights from the market that can enhance the search experience. For example, the provider may analyze search patterns and user behavior across their customer base to fine-tune your search features.</li><li><strong>Bottom-line impact</strong> - at the end of the day, better and more performant search features deliver increased customer satisfaction, higher engagement, and, ultimately, more conversions.</li></ol>

<h3><strong>But Why Not Improve Search In-House?</strong></h3>

<p>Revamping the e-commerce search in-house should always be the first option. But there are cases when it’s not the best alternative.</p><p>First of all, time and know-how. Search providers focus on delivering top search features – that’s their business goal. Integrating these features instead of developing from scratch means saving time in development and research.</p><p>The integration raises valid concerns: Isn’t it too complex or costly? Fortunately, the Search-as-a-Service market has matured in recent years, with many vendors offering flexible, cost-effective solutions with different pricing options.&nbsp;</p><p>The mature Search-as-a-Service market means shallow risk when testing different integrations and implementations.</p>

<h2>Features of Search Engines in E-Commerce</h2>

<p>Let’s talk about features that make customers love search – these are the ones you should look for in your SaaS research.</p><p>While some of these features may overlap, each contributes to creating a seamless, intuitive, and engaging search experience that can increase conversions and customer loyalty.</p>

<p>The search engine analyzes ranking factors like product attributes, customer behavior, and search intent to surface the most relevant products based on the customer's query.</p>

<p>The search engine provides dynamic suggestions and product recommendations based on the customer's query and browsing history, helping them discover new items.</p><p>These relevant search results can help customers discover new items they may not have otherwise found, driving increased engagement and sales.</p>

<p>The search engine can deliver personalized results and tailored recommendations by integrating with the customer's account, search history, and location.</p><p>It might include tailored search results, customized product rankings, and specialized recommendations that cater to the individual's preferences and shopping habits.</p>

<p>The search engine provides relevant query suggestions as the customer types, saving time and helping customers refine their searches and discover products they may not have initially considered. A good reference is Google Search's suggestions.</p>

<p>A dedicated results page with an intuitive layout showing product details like images, pricing, reviews, and sorting and filtering options.</p>

<p>With semantic search, the search engine understands natural language queries and allows customers to narrow down results using detailed filters.</p><p>Natural language processing is a powerful tool to provide personalized experiences and more relevant results.</p>

<p>Enables customers to explore and refine their results by dynamically applying multiple filters.&nbsp;</p><p>This can be particularly useful for e-commerce sites with large, complex product catalogs, as it helps customers quickly identify the items they're looking for.</p>

<p>Providing customers with the ability to preview product details, such as images, descriptions, and reviews, directly from the search results page can enhance the overall search experience and reduce the number of clicks required to make a purchase decision.</p>

<p>Curated search results are a feature that promotes specific products, collections, or content based on search queries.</p><p>It has numerous benefits since it highlights chosen products with lightning-fast results, increasing conversion rates.</p>

<p>Enables customers to upload images and find visually similar products in the catalog. This can be particularly useful for fashion and home decor retailers.</p>

<p>Incorporating these features into your e-commerce through a Search as a Service platform can help you deliver a truly exceptional search experience that not only delights your customers but also drives increased engagement, conversions, and revenue for your business.</p>

<h2>The Best Search as a Service Engines to Improve E-Commerce Search Results</h2>

<p>With all considerations out of the way, let’s cover the best options of Search-as-Service providers.</p>

The Best Search as a Service Engines to Improve E-Commerce Search Results

<h2><strong>How to Choose the Ideal Search as a Service Platform?</strong></h2>

<p>When selecting the ideal Search as a Service solution for your e-commerce business, consider these key factors:</p><ul><li><strong>Assess your requirements. </strong>Clearly define your needs, whether handling an extensive product catalog, integrating with your platform, or supporting multiple languages. In particular, consider if you need a bare-bones SaaS offering or something more comprehensive, such as a Digital Experience Platform (DXP), where search is only a fraction of the product.</li><li><strong>Evaluate customization and flexibility. </strong>Look for solutions that offer a high degree of customization and the ability to adapt as your business evolves.</li><li><strong>Consider scalability and performance. </strong>Ensure the SaaS provider can scale seamlessly to handle increased traffic and maintain fast, reliable search functionality.</li><li><strong>Consider pricing and deployment options. </strong>Evaluate the pricing structure and deployment models (cloud, on-premises, hybrid) to find the best fit for your budget and preferences.</li><li><strong>Simulate investment scenarios. </strong>Platforms often charge monthly based on usage (number of requests and records) on top of the base price. Be sure to simulate your average needs beforehand to avoid surprises.</li><li><strong>Prioritize ease of integration. </strong>Choose a solution with robust APIs and a straightforward implementation process to minimize disruption.</li><li><strong>Evaluate the provider's expertise. </strong>Prioritize vendors with deep e-commerce experience and a proven track record of successful search deployments.</li></ul>

How to Choose the Ideal Search as a Service Platform?

<h2><strong>Low Risk, High Reward: Adopting a Search as a Service Engine</strong></h2>

<p>It’s no secret that search is critical in e-commerce. But, optimizing the search experience to drive conversions can be technically challenging.</p><p>Fortunately, Search-as-a-Service integrations help with just that. They offload the technical considerations so you can focus on making customers happy.&nbsp;</p><p>Hopefully, we made the research more accessible. For more information on how to integrate SaaS with your e-commerce, get in touch with us right away.</p>

m-zine

Author

Łukasz Szewczyk

Articles

How to Choose the Best Headless CMS for E-Commerce?

How to Choose the Ideal Search as a Service in E-Commerce?

Author

Articles

Łukasz Szewczyk

How to Choose the Best Headless CMS for E-Commerce?

How to Choose the Ideal Search as a Service in E-Commerce?

Let’s engineer great products and systems together