Headless WooCommerce and Headless Shopify: Two Real Builds
Keep WooCommerce or Shopify as the engine, replace the storefront with a fast custom front end. Here is what that actually looked like on two of my projects: Grillo Services on WooCommerce, Get Up Earlier on Shopify.
By Michael Baker ยท
Headless is a simple idea. You keep WooCommerce or Shopify running products, inventory, and checkout in the back. You throw out the theme and build the storefront the customer sees as a fast custom front end that talks to the platform through its API.
I have two clients on it right now, one on each platform. Here is what the work actually looked like, pulled straight from the task log.
Quick note on where this comes from. I have personally migrated 4 Shopify Plus builds, I am a Shopify Plus Partner, and over 25 years I have built hundreds of sites across WordPress and Shopify. The take that follows is from doing the work, not watching from the sidelines. When it comes to Shopify and WooCommerce, the front end or theme causes so many issues. Headless gives YOU the owner full power to control what is on the screen.
Why AI Cannot Replace the Platform Yet
There is a lot of hype right now about vibe coding, the idea that you can just describe a store to an AI and have it write all the code. Let me be direct. Vibe coding is not ready to tackle full ecommerce, and it is not close. This work is 100 percent best left to Shopify or WooCommerce for now. There are far too many details, taxes, shipping rules, payment processing, fraud handling, inventory, refunds, compliance, and years of edge cases that those platforms have already solved. Recreating that from scratch with AI would be a waste of time and money.
That is exactly why both of these builds keep the platform as the engine. AI is incredible for the storefront, the design, the content, the custom features, and the speed of iteration. It is not the place to rebuild a checkout that already works.
Here is where it gets interesting. Shopify has now adopted its own helpful internal AI agent, exactly as I suspected a year ago, and it is only going to gain power and strength from here. The smart money is not on rebuilding the platform with AI. It is on the platform absorbing AI directly into itself.
It will not be long before these platforms and AI search are essentially one. Customers may never actually land on a website to buy your product. They will ask an assistant, and the assistant will complete the purchase straight through the platform. When that happens, having your catalog and checkout living inside a real ecommerce platform, with a fast custom front end on top, is exactly where you want to be.
What Headless Means
A normal store is one bundled thing. The platform runs the catalog and the checkout, and the same platform also runs the theme, the layout, and every page. Stack a few apps on a theme and it gets slow and clunky, and you end up fighting the theme instead of building the site you want.
Headless splits the two jobs. The platform stays the engine. The storefront becomes its own custom front end. The owner still works in WooCommerce or Shopify for products and orders. Nothing new to learn on the back end.
Grillo Services on WooCommerce
Grillo Services is a 30 plus year bulk landscape supply and organic recycling company in Milford, CT, and one of the more advanced projects I have finished recently. They sell mulch, topsoil, compost, sand, gravel, dumpsters, fertilizers, and tools. WooCommerce was already running the store. Instead of replacing a very carefully customized WooCommerce build, I kept it alive as the engine and completely rebuilt the customer facing experience around it. The new storefront is live at GrilloServices.com.
Why I Kept WooCommerce
The only real alternative was a full Shopify Plus migration. I am a Shopify Plus Partner myself and have personally completed 4 Shopify Plus builds, and in many cases Shopify is my preferred ecommerce platform. But Grillo is different.
Grillo has highly specific delivery logic: town based shipping zones, Rate 1 and Rate 2 delivery structures, bulk material calculations, and operational workflows built around exactly how the business runs. There are no out of the box Shopify apps that handle that properly, so everything would have become custom engineering. Recreating that ecosystem inside Shopify Plus would realistically have been a 40,000 to 50,000 dollar plus project, and that is the low end.
AI is also not at the point where it replaces deeply customized ecommerce operations from scratch without an existing platform underneath it. For a business with years of operational refinement already built into WooCommerce, the smarter move is preserving the proven backend logic and rebuilding the frontend around it. So instead of forcing a migration because AI or Shopify sounds newer, I preserved what already worked and modernized the customer experience completely.
To be clear, this is the exception. Out of 29 migrations I have done into AI first architecture, Grillo is one of the only cases where I intentionally kept WordPress in the stack. The sites that stay on WordPress are usually the ones with massive content libraries, years of SEO equity, or deeply customized ecommerce that would be financially irresponsible to rebuild. For most small business sites, I remove WordPress entirely. For Grillo, keeping the backend was the correct call.
What I Actually Built
I separated the storefront from the engine. Customers now shop on a fast, modern site, while WooCommerce keeps handling products, inventory, checkout, taxes, shipping, payments, and orders behind the scenes. The storefront was rebuilt around my art direction and the brand we have developed together over our 15 plus year working relationship. It now includes:
- Modern category browsing across mulch, topsoil, compost, sand, gravel, dumpsters, fertilizers, and tools
- Product detail pages with variation selectors and image galleries
- Persistent cart functionality
- Bulk delivery lookup by town
- Yardage calculators and utility tools
- Long form SEO landing pages targeting local search traffic
- Seasonal homepage sections and promotional product collections
- Embedded product video and educational content
- A custom styled blog and content system with FAQs and inline product recommendations
The biggest shift is how easy the site is to change now. No more bloated themes, fragile page builders, or plugin conflicts fighting every design tweak. New seasonal sections, calculators, landing pages, and collections can be added quickly, while the store engine keeps humming along untouched.
The Checkout Bridge
Checkout still works exactly as the Grillo team expects. When a customer is ready to buy, the new storefront hands the cart off to the existing WooCommerce checkout, so payments, taxes, shipping, and order management all keep running without interruption. For the customer, the site is faster and cleaner, especially on mobile. For the business, the day to day tools stay familiar while the storefront becomes far more flexible.
Klaviyo and the First Newsletter
With the storefront live, I wired Klaviyo into the WooCommerce events so the email calendar matches the season: topsoil and seeding in spring, mulch in summer, cleanup in fall, firewood in winter. Product based segments handle post purchase, browse, and back in stock.
Then I connected the newsletter tool to Klaviyo so weekly campaigns land as ready to send drafts, redid the email design around the real Grillo logo and a single Shop Our New Website button, and sent the first one. It was AI drafted and human proofed, I reviewed the copy, the product order, and the layout before it went out. Mulch leads, the call to action is front and center.
Get Up Earlier on Shopify
Get Up Earlier is my own coaching brand, so it doubles as the place I try things first. The approach is the same as Grillo, just on the other platform. All of Shopify's core features stay in use: products, inventory, checkout, payments, taxes, and shipping. What changes is the storefront, which is custom built and styled by hand. The site, the blog, the cart, the product pages, and the client tools all live there.
That styling is not generic AI output. I art direct it the way a seasoned agency art director would, drawing on a long history of building websites: hundreds on WordPress, 4 Shopify Plus migrations, and dozens of Shopify store builds. I am also a Shopify Plus Partner. Headless Shopify lets me keep everything that makes Shopify reliable while designing the storefront with no theme fighting me.
Showing the Right Products
If you run a store, you know the small problems that quietly cost you sales. On this one, the men's collection was accidentally showing a few women's products, the kind of thing a shopper notices even when you do not. We cleaned it up so every collection now shows exactly the products it should, nothing extra.
From there we built a few fresh, hand picked collections so customers can shop by the style they are in the mood for instead of digging through one giant list. Because the storefront is custom, we can spin up a new themed collection or seasonal page whenever there is a reason to, without waiting on a theme or an app.
A Smoother Shopping Experience
A handful of upgrades from the same stretch, all aimed at making the store easier and more pleasant to use:
- The cart preview now shows product photos and links straight back to each item, so it is easy to double check an order before buying.
- Every product page has simple share buttons, so customers (and you) can send a direct link to any item in one tap.
- A clean client view that is easy to read on a big screen, with private share links you can hand to a specific person.
None of this required reworking Shopify itself. Orders, payments, and checkout still run in Shopify exactly as before. All of these improvements live in the storefront on top of it.
The Takeaway
Headless is not a silver bullet, and it is not the right move for every store. The checkout still takes real work, like the custom bridge plugin behind Grillo. But when a business has a proven backend worth keeping, headless gives you a fast storefront you fully control, custom features that ship as code instead of as another plugin, and an art directed design with no theme fighting you. Grillo is the rare case where I kept WordPress. Get Up Earlier shows the same approach on Shopify, which is far more often my preferred platform.
If your theme is fighting you and you want to keep WooCommerce or Shopify under the hood, let's talk.
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