Headless for commerce

This is for:

Developer

What’s Coveo Headless for Commerce?

Coveo Headless is a library for developing Coveo-powered UI components. It works as a middle layer for applications, opening a line of communication between the UI elements and Coveo.

At its core, Headless consists of an engine whose state (see Redux store) depends on a set of features (see reducers). To interact with those features, Headless provides a collection of controllers.

In the context of Coveo for Commerce, Headless is used in conjunction with theCoveo Merchandising Hub (CMH) to power your product discovery interfaces. For Commerce, Headless exposes the Commerce Engine, which uses the Commerce API to query products from Coveo, and the Event Protocol to send analytics events to Coveo.

Note

As Headless wraps around the Commerce API, it’s also descriptive in nature. See How the Commerce API interacts with the CMH for more information.

When should you use Headless?

The Headless library wraps the complexity of the Coveo APIs without sacrificing flexibility. It’s usable with any web development framework and it manages the state of your page for you. Rather than prebuilt UI components in Atomic, it provides an extendable set of reducers and controllers that allow you to connect your own product discovery UI components to the Coveo APIs.

If you want to use Coveo to power your own UI component library, then you should definitely consider using Headless.

Where to start?

To learn the basics of Headless, see the Usage section.

You may also want to check out the Headless commerce engine reference documentation.