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The decision on the table is whether to rebuild your storefront as a separate front end, and which route to take there. The back end keeps its value either way: products, prices, promotions and orders stay where they are. The new front end is code your organisation owns, and it needs a team long after launch. That ownership, more than the technology, decides whether the investment returns anything.
What headless means on Salesforce B2C Commerce
On Salesforce, headless means the storefront runs as its own application and talks to Commerce Cloud (Agentforce Commerce) through APIs. Composable Storefront (PWA Kit) is Salesforce's framework for that front end: a React-based progressive web app, which is a website that behaves like an app on a phone. Merchandisers keep working in Business Manager, and Page Designer content, search and promotions still come from the platform.
Composable goes one step further. Because the front end only consumes APIs, you can swap a single component, such as search or content management, for a specialised service without touching the rest. That freedom has a price. Every swapped component is one more contract, integration and support line to manage.
Headless pays off for some businesses and not for others
Headless earns its cost when the front end is where you compete. Brands that release new campaigns and page types every week, serve several countries from one platform or want an app-like mobile experience get the most from it. A retailer with a stable template and a small digital team often gets more from a well-run standard storefront.
The deciding factors are release frequency, the size of your front-end team and how far your brand experience departs from a standard shop. We have set out those criteria in more detail when deciding whether headless fits you.
Choosing a storefront: SFRA, Composable Storefront or Storefront Next
Salesforce currently supports three storefront routes on B2C Commerce. SFRA, the Storefront Reference Architecture, is the traditional template-based storefront with a large base of ready-made integrations. Composable Storefront is the headless route. Storefront Next, a server-first React storefront, arrived in the Summer '26 release as the newest option.
Which one fits depends on your integrations, your team's skills and how much you plan to change the front end. We compare the first two in depth in SFRA versus Composable Storefront. FORWARD is one of roughly fifteen global members of the B2C Commerce Consulting Partner Advisory Board. That seat gives us early input on where Salesforce takes its storefront roadmap, which matters when you choose a route you will run for years.
Hosting moves to Salesforce with Managed Runtime
Composable Storefront runs on Managed Runtime, the Salesforce hosting environment for headless storefronts. Salesforce handles servers, scaling under peak traffic and the security of the hosting layer. Your team deploys new versions of the storefront and can roll back when a release misbehaves.
Your own code stays yours. Performance of custom components, third-party scripts and the quality of each release stay with you. We explain the split of responsibilities in what Managed Runtime takes over.
