Just a few years ago, one website was enough for most businesses. It served as the main point of contact with customers, acting as a storefront, a checkout, and an office at the same time, with all roads leading there. Today, this situation is rather the exception. In most cases, customers interact with businesses through dozens of different channels. Some visit the website, some use a mobile application, some first discover the brand on social media and continue engaging with it there. Others find the company through marketplace pages, while some come via B2B portals or internal corporate systems, and so on.
In practice, a single business ends up with several channels for generating customer traffic. As a result, each customer forms their own journey and their own expectations of the product or service. It is at this point that a key question arises for the company: should all of this be built as separate systems, each with its own logic, teams, and budgets, or is it possible to design the architecture in a different way?
Based on our observations, the market is still dominated by the classic approach to building digital products. It looks as follows: the website lives its own life, the mobile application evolves separately, the B2B dashboard exists on its own, and the internal admin panel turns into yet another standalone system. Data starts to get duplicated, business logic diverges, the number of errors increases, and maintaining this entire setup becomes more expensive and problematic. As a result, the business ends up not with a single manageable ecosystem, but with a set of fragmented solutions that are highly nuanced, poorly connected to each other, and require significant resources to maintain.
How an architecture with multiple frontends works
This alternative approach starts with a simple but fundamental idea: data and business logic should be located in one place. A single backend stores products, prices, inventory levels, users, orders, and sales rules. This becomes a single source of truth for the entire business, while different interfaces simply access this data and use the shared logic without duplicating it or creating parallel versions of the same processes.
When businesses talk about having multiple frontends, they usually mean a set of separate projects with a single point of entry into the same business. This can include a marketing website, an online store, a mobile application, a B2B portal for partners, a POS system, or internal tools for the team, and so on. For external users, these are different products with different user experiences, while for the business, it is one management system operating under unified rules and using the same data.
Business benefits of this architecture
The main business benefits of this architecture are speed and cost efficiency. A company can launch new customer acquisition channels without rewriting the backend and freely experiment with formats and products. At the same time, teams work in parallel without interfering with each other, maintaining a high level of efficiency and flexibility. When all business logic is concentrated in one place, there is no need to duplicate the same rules across different systems. The number of bugs decreases because changes are made once and immediately applied to all interfaces. Maintenance becomes cheaper since instead of supporting multiple complex systems, the business only needs to maintain a single architectural foundation.
With this architecture, the business also gains much stronger control over its processes. It operates with unified rules, unified data, and a single administrative panel. As a result, management sees the full picture of what is happening, and decisions are made based on one consistent version of data rather than fragmented reports from different systems.
Why traditional CMS platforms limit business growth
Traditional CMS platforms were originally designed as a backend for a website. Their architecture is tightly connected to templates and a specific interface, so as long as a business had only one website, the system handled its tasks well. However, with the emergence of mobile applications, B2B dashboards, marketplaces, and internal tools, these limitations become obvious. Supporting multiple interfaces is difficult, every extension makes the system more complex, and each modification starts to trigger more and more side effects.
At a certain point, the business is forced to use the CMS beyond its original purpose, adding custom logic and temporary workarounds to cover new requirements. As a result, the system turns into a complex structure that is difficult to develop, scale, and maintain without constant costs.
What really happens when a business grows
Business growth in the online environment almost always follows the same pattern. First, a website is launched, then a mobile application appears, partners are onboarded, the company enters marketplaces, and internal tools for the team are developed in parallel. The number of customer acquisition channels increases, and as mentioned earlier in this article, the complexity of management grows at the same time.
In a classic architecture, each new channel brings its own backend. This means separate databases and separate rules for handling orders, prices, inventory, and other business processes. As a result, information starts to diverge across different systems. The price on the website may not match the price in the mobile app. Inventory levels in the warehouse may differ from what users see in the application, and so on.
With a headless architecture built around a single backend, these problems do not occur. All channels work with the same data. When any information is updated, changes are instantly reflected across all sales channels. It is clear that with this approach, the business owner gains a much higher level of control over business processes.
Finally, we would like to note that OneEntry was designed from the ground up in a headless paradigm and fully meets modern requirements for digital product architecture. This approach reduces a wide range of risks, helps businesses save resources, and accelerates growth both in terms of time and budget. We hope this article has been useful to you. If you have any questions, we will be happy to discuss them and share our experience.
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