Today, we’re joined by Dominic Jainy, a leading architect in the enterprise ecommerce space, known for his expertise in merging flexible, modern frontends with the robust power of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. We’ll explore the strategic considerations behind adopting a headless architecture, discussing when this powerful approach becomes a competitive advantage and when a more traditional model might be the wiser choice. Our conversation will cover the nuances of omnichannel experiences, the specific challenges of B2B implementations, and the critical importance of a mature ERP foundation before embarking on such a transformative project.
In a headless architecture, Business Central often acts as the system of record for products and pricing. Could you walk me through how a separate frontend handles the user experience and what key entities, like inventory and orders, require the most careful API integration planning?
Absolutely. It’s a beautiful separation of concerns when done right. The frontend—say, a custom React or Next.js application—is completely decoupled and free to focus purely on creating a compelling, fast, and highly tailored user experience. It handles all the visual presentation, the SEO, the merchandising, and the content management. Meanwhile, Business Central sits quietly in the background, serving as the single source of truth. When a customer browses, the frontend calls an API to get product and pricing data. The most critical part, where I’ve seen projects succeed or fail, is in the careful planning of those API connections. You absolutely have to get the flow right for the core entities: the product catalog with all its variants, customer data, and especially the near-real-time data like inventory by location. Then, you have the transactional data—orders, shipments, and returns—which must be robustly integrated to ensure that what happens on the web is accurately reflected in the financial and operational systems. The web framework choice is almost secondary to getting those Business Central integration patterns rock-solid.
Consider a manufacturer with complex B2B needs like customer-specific catalogs and contract pricing, who also wants an omnichannel presence. How does a headless approach allow them to reuse backend logic from Business Central across a B2B portal, a mobile app, and in-store kiosks?
That’s a perfect scenario where headless truly shines and moves from a buzzword to a strategic necessity. For a manufacturer like that, all the complex business logic—the contract pricing, customer-specific catalogs, those unique quantity breaks—already lives inside Business Central. With a traditional, monolithic system, you’d have to rebuild that logic for every new channel. It’s a nightmare of duplication. But in a headless model, you expose that logic through a set of secure, well-designed APIs. Suddenly, your B2B portal, your field sales mobile app, and even an in-store kiosk for distributors are all consuming the same data from the same source. You’re reusing that core backend for every single frontend without ever duplicating the integration effort. It’s incredibly efficient and ensures a consistent experience for the customer, no matter how they interact with the company.
Many companies are drawn to headless for its flexibility. For a business that just needs a standard web shop, what are the primary risks and unnecessary complexities introduced by choosing a headless architecture over a more traditional, tightly integrated storefront? Please share some specifics.
This is a critical point of caution. I’ve seen teams get swept up in the headless hype when their needs are actually quite straightforward. For a business that just needs a standard web shop with a smaller catalog and simple pricing, going headless is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The primary risk is a massive inflation of cost and complexity for almost no tangible benefit. You’re suddenly responsible for building, hosting, and monitoring a custom frontend, managing a complex middleware layer, and maintaining sophisticated API integrations. This requires a dedicated team with strong frontend, API, and DevOps skills. A more traditional, tightly integrated storefront from the app store is often faster to deploy, significantly cheaper to maintain, and comes with out-of-the-box integrations that are perfectly sufficient for those standard use cases. Choosing headless in that scenario often leads to a slower time-to-market and a much higher total cost of ownership.
Headless projects amplify both good and bad architectural decisions. Can you share an example of a common but critical mistake a team without deep Business Central expertise might make when designing the data flows, and what are the long-term consequences for system maintainability?
A classic and devastating mistake I’ve seen is failing to design robust error handling and fallback behaviors, especially for order posting. A team without deep Business Central experience might build a simple API that just pushes an order from the website to the ERP. But what happens if Business Central is down for a nightly backup or a connection momentarily fails? Without a well-designed middleware or queuing system, that order is simply lost. The customer gets an error message, or worse, no message at all, and the sale vanishes into the ether. The long-term consequence is a brittle, unreliable system. Every minor network hiccup becomes a fire drill, support tickets pile up, and the business loses all trust in the platform. You end up with a solution that delivers neither the agility promised by headless nor the stability expected from an ERP, creating a maintenance nightmare that constantly requires manual intervention.
When designing the integration, teams face key decisions like choosing between near-real-time and batch synchronization for inventory. How does this choice impact both the customer experience and system performance, and what factors should a business consider when deciding on the right approach for them?
This decision is a fundamental balancing act between customer experience and system load. A near-real-time sync for inventory provides the best possible customer experience—what they see on the site is what’s actually in the warehouse, preventing overselling and disappointment. However, this means constant API calls to Business Central, which can put a significant performance strain on the ERP, especially for high-volume sites. On the other hand, a batch sync—say, every 15 minutes—is much lighter on the system but introduces a lag. In that 15-minute window, you could sell out of a popular item without the website knowing. A business must consider its sales velocity and customer tolerance. For a low-volume seller of specialized equipment, a batch update might be perfectly fine. But for a fast-fashion retailer launching a limited-edition product, that real-time accuracy is non-negotiable to avoid a customer service disaster.
An organization might still be stabilizing its core finance and warehousing processes in Business Central. From your perspective, what are the biggest dangers of layering a complex headless ecommerce project on top of an ERP implementation that is not yet fully mature?
Attempting this is, frankly, building a skyscraper on a foundation of wet sand. It’s incredibly dangerous. The biggest danger is that you overload the organization’s capacity for change and introduce immense project risk. A headless project depends entirely on a stable, well-defined data source from the ERP. If your team is still figuring out its core inventory, finance, and warehousing processes in Business Central, the data you’re feeding the headless front end will be inconsistent and unreliable. This creates a cascading effect of failures—incorrect stock levels, wrong pricing, and failed order submissions. You end up in a frustrating cycle of blaming the ecommerce platform when the root cause is an unstable ERP. My strong recommendation is always to first stabilize and master the core Business Central processes. Get that foundation solid before even considering a project as complex as a headless implementation.
What is your forecast for headless ecommerce on top of ERP systems like Business Central?
My forecast is that the adoption will continue to grow, but it will become much more pragmatic and targeted. The initial hype cycle is maturing, and companies are realizing that headless is not a universal solution but a powerful tool for specific, complex business needs. We’ll see fewer businesses choosing it just because it’s the trendy architecture and more choosing it for the right reasons: true omnichannel requirements, deep B2B complexity, or the need for extreme frontend agility and experimentation. I also predict a rise in more sophisticated middleware and iPaaS solutions that will help bridge the gap between Business Central and headless frontends, making these integrations more manageable. The organizations that succeed will be those that honestly assess their needs and internal capabilities, understanding that a successful headless project is less about the frontend technology and more about a solid, API-first strategy built on a well-implemented ERP core.