Headless usually starts with separating the frontend from the commerce backend. Composable architecture goes further by allowing teams to choose and replace individual capabilities — search, checkout, CMS, promotions, product data, payments — without rebuilding the entire platform.

This comparison of composable commerce vs headless gives a useful breakdown of where the two approaches overlap and where they differ.

For teams already running a headless setup, I’m curious: what usually becomes the trigger to move toward a more composable architecture — scaling issues, vendor limitations, release speed, or something else?