‘Headless’ is one of those words that sounds like a decision you’re supposed to have an opinion about. A developer or an agency mentions it, and suddenly you’re weighing an architecture choice you didn’t ask for, for a store that’s currently doing fine. On a normal Shopify store, the part your customer sees – the storefront – and the part that runs the shop – the cart, checkout, catalogue, orders – come welded together. Going headless means splitting them: you keep a commerce engine for payments and orders, but you build the storefront yourself, from scratch, as a custom website that talks to that engine over an API. It’s whether owning that front half is worth what it costs you to build and keep it running.