Headless e-commerce separates the storefront customers see from the commerce platform that holds products and orders, so the site can be lighter, faster and connected to other systems.
What it does, in order, and what it never does.
Connections
What the system never does
KINTO builds headless stores for companies whose current store is slow, fragile or disconnected from their real inventory.
A store can fail in different ways, and KINTO has seen several. A specialty retailer’s WooCommerce store went down intermittently when bots crawled filter URLs, bypassed the cache and saturated the database. A networking distributor had a large, heterogeneous catalog with no normalized technical data and a heavy, slow product listing on mobile. An auto parts distributor’s catalog had almost no images or collections, no global search and broken links, while its real inventory lived in an ERP nobody synced with the store.
Behind these sit two common issues: a platform that cannot carry the catalog, and data that is wrong or missing.
KINTO audits the catalog first and checks the store against the inventory. Then it migrates programmatically, enriching brand and type, and builds a storefront on top of the company’s commerce platform with bulk loading, product SEO, search (by vehicle in the auto parts case) and edge caching.
Three practices recur:
Retailers and distributors with thousands of products, a slow or fragile store, and an ERP or inventory list that should drive what is shown. The measured outcomes are page weight, response times and catalog size. For later sales and conversion, the cases state there is no evidence yet.
Headless e-commerce
By making the ERP, not the web catalog, the source of truth, KINTO got an auto parts distributor’s WhatsApp agent to offer ≈26% more real products and stop offering hundreds it did not have.
WhatsApp & voice agents
By analyzing a year of invoices, KINTO found that fewer than half of a food manufacturer’s customers drove almost all of its volume; we built a production WhatsApp agent, an AI calling pilot and a headless store that kept every URL.
Migrations & rescue
A store with thousands of products kept going down under a swarm of bots crawling filters; KINTO stabilized it in days and migrated it to a headless shop whose listing weighs ≈1% of what it did.
Headless e-commerce
KINTO migrated a networking distributor’s catalog to a headless store that weighs a fifth of what it did and, with no public prices, turns every product page into a WhatsApp quote request.
Headless e-commerce
KINTO took a recurring prepaid event to selling with real payment, per-date and per-location seat control and automatic reconciliation; payments went to production three days after the first commit.
To migrate a WooCommerce store to headless without losing SEO, inventory every URL before touching anything, keep the same paths wherever possible, 301-redirect the rest, and measure page weight before and after. KINTO kept about 98% of one store's URLs on the same path.
It should not if URLs are handled first. In a food manufacturer's migration, every store URL was inventoried before moving anything and about 98% stayed on the same path. In a networking distributor's migration, 301 redirects covered the old URLs.
In KINTO's cases, a networking distributor's product listing dropped about 80% in weight, from roughly 0.5 MB to under 0.1 MB. A specialty retailer's listing went from several MB to about 0.1 MB. Both figures were measured before and after the migration on real pages.
Catalog mode is a store behavior for products without a public price: when the price is zero, the site hides price and cart and shows a WhatsApp button with the product prefilled. KINTO built it for a B2B distributor that sells by quote, turning every product page into a quote request.
Yes, by making the ERP the source of truth. For an auto parts distributor with over 10,000 products online, availability is confirmed against ERP data synced daily. The cross-check found hundreds of products offered with no stock and over a thousand marked sold out that were in stock.
Yes. KINTO configures an automatic rebuild when the catalog changes, so listings, product search and structured data stay in sync without manual publishing. This is used in the networking distributor and auto parts cases, alongside llms.txt and structured data for products and FAQs.
Yes, as a design goal: keep the same paths where possible and redirect the rest with 301s. In one migration KINTO inventoried every store URL first and about 98% stayed on the same path; in another, 301 redirects covered the old URLs. None of its migration cases yet has evidence of later sales or rankings.
Tell KINTO what is going on. The first conversation is to understand it, not to sell.
