Next.js + Vercel SFCC Composable Storefront

The Checkout Page Is Not Where You’re Losing Money

Every time ecommerce sales slow down, there’s a familiar reaction. Someone says, “We need to fix checkout.” It sounds logical. Checkout is the final step before purchase, so if conversions are low, that must be the problem. Except it usually isn’t.

Checkout is rarely where you’re losing money.

If customers make it to checkout, they’ve already done the hard work: they trust your brand, they like your product, and they’ve overcome most buying friction. The few who drop off there aren’t your biggest problem. The real leaks in your ecommerce funnel happen upstream, long before the “Buy Now” button.

1. The Bounce Problem: You’re Losing Customers Before They Even Shop

Let’s start with bounce rates.

We’ve seen legacy SiteGenesis ecommerce sites lose up to 40% of mobile visitors before they ever reach a product page. That’s not checkout’s fault. That’s a performance and engagement problem.

If your site loads slowly, feels outdated, or fails to grab attention in the first three seconds, checkout perfection won’t matter. The customer is already gone.

When brands replatform to a composable storefront, bounce rates drop by 20–40%. That single improvement drives more net-new revenue than a dozen checkout tweaks ever could.

2. The Engagement Gap: Stale Content Kills Conversions

Even after visitors stay, engagement is where most ecommerce brands lose money.

Too many stores still run on rigid, outdated CMS systems that make it hard for marketers to launch campaigns quickly. If your homepage looks the same for weeks or your product content feels generic, you’re losing sales every day.

Customers crave freshness, relevance, and inspiration. They want to see why to buy, and none of that happens in checkout.

A modern headless CMS or composable commerce setup empowers your marketing team to launch new campaigns, update landing pages, and test offers without waiting on IT. That flexibility keeps your store active, relevant, and converting.

3. The Performance Drag: Slow Sites Destroy Purchase Intent

Site speed and performance are silent killers.

Every extra second of load time increases bounce rates and lowers conversions. Clunky navigation, laggy search, and broken filters add friction at every step.

By the time a motivated shopper reaches checkout, you’ve already lost half the people who intended to buy. They didn’t leave because your payment form was bad; they left because the site made the journey painful.

Investing in fast, mobile-first architecture pays far higher dividends than obsessing over the final form field.

4. The Real Role of Checkout: Keep It Seamless and Move On

Checkout still matters, but it’s not your growth engine.

Yes, it should be fast, simple, and trustworthy. Offer guest checkout, enable multiple payment methods, and eliminate unnecessary clicks. But once it works reliably, treat it like plumbing, something that just works quietly in the background.

Most enterprise checkouts are already functional. The smartest brands invest just enough to keep them frictionless, then focus their energy on the upstream experience where the money is truly made.

5. Where to Focus Instead: The True Drivers of Conversion Growth

If you want to meaningfully improve ecommerce performance, shift your focus from checkout optimization to experience optimization. Start with:

• Site performance, especially on mobile
• Bounce rate reduction through modern, composable front ends
• Faster campaign deployment with a flexible, headless CMS
• Personalization and search powered by AI
• Composable architecture that gives marketing full control of the customer journey
  

These are the levers that consistently drive 20% or higher conversion lifts in composable commerce builds we deliver at 64labs.

The Bottom Line: Fix the Real Leaks

It’s easy to blame checkout when conversions drop. It’s visible, measurable, and feels like an easy win. But the truth is, if you’re losing money at checkout, you’re looking too late in the funnel. The real revenue leaks happen earlier; in performance, content, and engagement. Fix those, and checkout takes care of itself.

In ecommerce, conversion growth doesn’t start at the finish line. It starts at the first click.

Scroll through LinkedIn for five minutes and you might think Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) is finished. People call it slow, rigid, and overpriced; a platform to escape from. The truth is different. 

‍SFCC isn’t dead. It’s just misunderstood.

When implemented correctly, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is one of the strongest foundations for modern composable commerce. The problem isn’t the platform itself. It’s how most teams have been using it.

Blame the Architecture, Not the Platform

Most critics of SFCC are still looking at outdated SiteGenesis or SFRA builds. Those were designed for a different era, with server-rendered templates and tightly coupled architectures. No wonder they feel slow and limited today. But underneath those layers, SFCC has always had solid fundamentals. It scales globally, supports massive catalogs, handles complex business rules, and integrates deeply with the Salesforce ecosystem. What it needed wasn’t a replacement. It needed a front-end reset. That reset arrived with Composable Storefront.

Composable Storefront Changes Everything

Pairing Salesforce Commerce Cloud with a headless front end, modern frameworks like React, and best-in-class CMS and search tools turns it into something completely new. The result is a fast, flexible, and scalable ecommerce experience. Marketing teams gain full control of content and campaigns. Developers can focus on high-impact work instead of maintenance. The business can finally experiment, optimize, and evolve, all without replacing the back end that already works.

At 64labs, we have delivered more than 10 full composable SFCC storefronts. Not prototypes or partial migrations, but complete rebuilds of legacy storefronts into faster, modular systems. The results are consistent: lower bounce rates, higher conversion, improved mobile performance, and more productive teams.

The Real Value: Operational Agility

The biggest win from a composable SFCC setup isn’t just technical. It’s operational.

A well-executed composable build gives marketing and merchandising teams real autonomy. Campaigns go live faster. IT teams spend less time on tickets and maintenance. And the business becomes more adaptable to new technologies like AI-driven content and personalization. In short, a composable Salesforce Commerce Cloud implementation transforms Salesforce from a bottleneck into a growth engine.

Don’t Buy the Hype, Choose the Right Fit

There’s no shortage of hype around “next-generation” platforms. Shopify is fast to launch, but limited when enterprise complexity comes into play. CommerceTools is beautifully modular, but often demands large budgets and advanced engineering teams to implement. Salesforce Commerce Cloud sits in the middle. It combines enterprise stability with composable flexibility. It is the ideal solution for large brands that want modern capabilities without sacrificing proven reliability.

The Only Thing That’s Dead Is the Excuse

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is alive and evolving. It just requires a modern composable approach and a team that knows how to implement it.

With the right architecture and mindset, SFCC delivers measurable results your executives will notice: faster launches, improved performance, and higher revenue.

The platform isn’t the problem, the strategy is. Fix that, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud becomes one of your brand’s strongest assets.

There’s something about the word “headless” that sparks confusion in the ecommerce world. It sounds cutting-edge and futuristic, which is why it ends up on pitch decks and sales slides everywhere. But too often, the people selling it don’t actually understand what it means in practice.

Let’s make this clear: headless doesn’t mean composable.
It doesn’t automatically make your site modern, flexible, or fast. All headless means is that your front end is decoupled from your back end. That’s it. One API connection does not equal a transformation. The mistake most teams make is assuming that going headless will magically make their ecommerce stack agile, AI-ready, and future-proof. In reality, all you’ve done is remove the head. Now you need to figure out what to do with the rest of the body.

Headless is a tactic, not a strategy.
It gives you freedom, but freedom without direction usually means wasted effort, higher costs, and longer launch times.

What Problem Does Headless Actually Solve?

Headless matters when your front end becomes a bottleneck. If your marketing or merchandising team can’t move fast, test new experiences, or personalize content without developer help, headless architecture can unlock real agility. It’s not valuable because it’s trendy. It’s valuable because it enables speed, testing, and flexibility that directly impact growth. The biggest misconception is that headless is about technology. It’s not.
What brands are really buying, or should be buying, is agility.

Headless Won’t Help If You Keep Old Habits

Many brands go headless but keep the same rigid processes that slowed them down in the first place. Developers still control every page. Marketers still file tickets for simple updates. CMS changes still take weeks. That’s not digital transformation. That’s an expensive facelift on an outdated process.

If you go headless, you’re committing to modular thinking. You’re choosing collaboration over control. You’re empowering different teams to own different parts of the site, each using tools suited to their needs. That’s what real flexibility looks like.

You Still Need a Head

“Headless” doesn’t mean you don’t need a front end. You still need a presentation layer, ideally built with a modern framework like React or Next.js that your internal team can maintain. It should connect seamlessly with your CMS, search, checkout, and personalization tools. It also needs to perform under heavy ecommerce load while staying easy to maintain. Headless only works when your “head” is just as strategic as your infrastructure.

Don’t Build a Frankenstack

The goal of headless commerce isn’t to show off your API count or tech stack complexity. It’s to ship faster, test more often, and create better customer experiences.

Composable architecture gives you the foundation to do that, and headless is just the first step. You still need the right CMS, the right search stack, the right workflow, and the right partner who has done it before. Going headless without a plan leads to chaos. Going headless with a strategy leads to growth.

If you’re serious about headless commerce, think beyond the decoupling. Think about what comes next. Otherwise, you’re just the proud owner of a decapitated monolith.