Headless eCommerce Software Business Requirements

This Excel-based requirements checklist gives you a pre-built RFP framework for evaluating headless eCommerce platforms — functional commerce capabilities plus roughly 100 non-functional requirements covering performance, security, scalability, integration, and compliance.

A generic list checks for a "product catalog API" and "checkout support" and stops there. It won't ask what happens to PCI DSS scope when your team owns the frontend — without tokenized hosted fields, you can inherit compliance obligations a traditional platform used to carry for you. It won't surface that many platforms marketed as "headless" are a GraphQL layer bolted onto the same monolithic commerce engine underneath, which only becomes visible once you try to build a custom checkout flow and hit business logic you can't reach through the API. And it won't ask how catalog queries and API rate limits hold up under a traffic spike, or how non-technical merchandisers preview content changes before publishing — trivial on a traditional platform, often an afterthought on a composable one.

What You Get

• Functional Requirements spanning catalog management, cart and checkout APIs, pricing and promotions, content orchestration, and order management
• 100+ Non-Functional Requirements covering performance, security, scalability, integration, and compliance
• Excel Evaluation Template with weighted scoring

How It's Used

• As the requirements core of an RFP sent to composable or MACH commerce vendors
• To pressure-test how much of a platform is genuinely API-first versus a headless wrapper over a monolith
• To align commerce, engineering, and merchandising teams on requirements before a build-vs-buy decision

Who Should Buy This

eCommerce leaders, solution architects, and procurement teams evaluating headless or composable commerce platforms.