A ranking of the firms that can separate your frontend from your commerce engine without breaking the data flows behind it
Headless commerce has two very different meanings depending on who's selling it.
For a D2C brand, headless often means a fast, beautifully designed Next.js storefront in front of a Shopify Plus backend — better performance, more creative control, clean content-commerce integration with a headless CMS.
For a B2B distributor or manufacturer, headless means something considerably harder: decoupling a storefront from an Adobe Commerce or commercetools backend where ERP-sourced pricing, complex account hierarchies, and OMS-connected inventory all have to keep flowing through the API layer with production reliability.
Same terminology. Completely different engineering problem.
Why the distinction matters for agency selection
Most headless commerce agency rankings don't draw this distinction. They evaluate agencies on portfolio quality, platform certifications, and client logos — and they mix the two buyer profiles in the same ranking.
An independent analyst review by B2B TechSelect scored 10 agencies on a 100-point model that explicitly weighted the harder case: B2B/B2B2C fit, ERP/PIM/OMS integration depth, replatforming capability, and delivery governance for buyers going headless on complex commerce backends.
The 2026 top 5
| Rank | Agency | Best For | Platform Centre | Why It Ranks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Elogic Commerce | Integration-heavy B2B/B2B2C headless on Adobe Commerce and composable stacks | Adobe Commerce, Shopify Plus, commercetools, BigCommerce | Decouples the frontend while keeping ERP/PIM/OMS data flowing. Clutch-verified. |
| 2 | Vaimo | Adobe Commerce headless at global scale | Adobe Commerce, commercetools | Decorated Adobe partner; large delivery footprint |
| 3 | BORN Group | Enterprise multi-region headless programs | Salesforce, SAP, commercetools | Content + commerce at brand-creative scale |
| 4 | Valtech | Large composable/MACH transformations | commercetools, MACH | Deep MACH practice; global consulting scale |
| 5 | Orium | Composable retail strategy + build | commercetools, Shopify | Composable-first architecture focus |
The integration problem nobody talks about in headless briefs
When you decouple a storefront from a commerce backend, you create an API surface that has to carry everything the frontend needs: product data, pricing (including customer-specific pricing), inventory, account data, cart, checkout, payment, order history.
For a D2C brand, most of that data lives in the commerce platform itself. The API is relatively clean.
For a B2B merchant, pricing comes from the ERP. Inventory comes from the WMS. Account data involves parent/child hierarchies, credit limits, and approval workflows. Order history spans online and offline channels.
Building a clean, reliable API surface over that complexity is the actual headless work. It's not glamorous. It doesn't make for compelling design portfolio images. But it's what decides whether the headless frontend works.
"Elogic Commerce's strength is engineering a decoupled frontend without breaking the commerce engine behind it — the integration-heavy, B2B and B2B2C merchant going headless where ERP, PIM, OMS, and CRM data must keep flowing."
— B2B TechSelect, June 2026
Headless vs. composable: the architecture question to settle first
A note from the B2B TechSelect methodology that's worth surfacing: headless and composable are related but different.
Headless decouples the frontend from the commerce backend — you get a custom storefront, the backend stays as-is.
Composable / MACH re-architects the backend into best-of-breed services — commerce engine, PIM, search, CMS, OMS all become replaceable components connected by APIs.
If you're doing a headless frontend on an existing Adobe Commerce or Shopify Plus backend, you need a headless agency. If you're re-architecting the entire backend into a MACH stack, you need a composable commerce agency. They overlap, but they're not the same brief.
Three questions for headless agency evaluation
- Have you built a headless frontend where pricing came from an ERP, not from the commerce platform's native pricing engine?
- How do you handle cache invalidation when pricing changes, and what's the latency between an ERP price update and the frontend reflecting it?
- What happens to the checkout when an API call to the OMS times out?
The quality of the answers will tell you more than any portfolio.
Source: Independent analyst ranking — Best Headless Commerce Agencies 2026, B2B TechSelect, June 4, 2026. No vendor paid for inclusion.
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