Headless commerce gets recommended for reasons that do not survive contact with a real store. "It is faster" is the most common, and it is not automatically true — a badly built headless storefront is comfortably slower than a well-built Liquid theme, because the performance came from discipline rather than architecture.
There are genuine reasons to go headless. They are narrower than the marketing suggests.
What headless actually means on Shopify
Shopify's storefront normally renders from Liquid templates. Headless separates that: Shopify keeps products, orders, customers and checkout, while the storefront is a separate application that reads data through the Storefront API.
Hydrogen is Shopify's own framework for this, built on Remix. Oxygen is Shopify's global edge hosting for Hydrogen apps, included rather than separately charged. You can also host a Hydrogen app on your own infrastructure through the Headless sales channel — the framework does not lock you to Oxygen.
Checkout stays on Shopify either way. That is the part people misunderstand: headless does not mean you own checkout.
The three situations where it wins
The storefront is not just a store. If the same application also has to serve substantial editorial content, a community, a booking flow, or a customer portal, forcing that into a Liquid theme fights the platform continuously. A React application that happens to sell things is a different shape of problem.
Commerce has to appear inside something you already run. A brand with an established app or web platform that wants to sell inside it — rather than sending people to a separate store — is the clearest case. Shopify becomes a commerce backend for a product you already own.
Content comes from somewhere else. If merchandising and content live in a separate CMS that the business is committed to, composing them in an application you control is more honest than syncing everything into Shopify metafields.
What you take on
Every theme feature you took for granted becomes yours to build. Search, filtering, cart behaviour, currency and market switching, discounts, gift cards, customer accounts — a theme ships all of it and a headless app ships none of it.
Apps stop being installable. A large part of the Shopify app ecosystem works by injecting into the theme. On a headless storefront, integrating an app usually means integrating its API yourself, and some apps have no path at all.
The merchandising team loses the theme editor. Whatever they could previously change without a developer now needs someone to build the equivalent authoring surface, or every change becomes a ticket.
The question to ask before committing
Write down the specific thing your current storefront cannot do. If the sentence is about speed, headless is probably the wrong tool — measure first, because most slow Shopify stores are slow from apps and images rather than from Liquid.
If the sentence is about the storefront being a different kind of application than a store, that is the real signal. That is the case headless was built for, and it is worth the cost.
Most stores get further with a better Online Store 2.0 theme; custom theme or premium theme? covers that decision, and our Shopify theme development page shows how we approach both.