Does NetSuite provide any sort of headless API? We’re considering building a headless site with NextJS and wanted to know if it’s at all possible to continue leveraging NetSuite as a backend

That would be very helpful

Sounds a really big challenge. I do not think that exists right now. The only API that you might use outside Suitecommerce context would be Item API. You need shipping methods, payments, taxes, etc

Yeah, that's what we figured. And I agree with the significant complexity of such an undertaking, which is why I wanted to ensure that I hadn't missed any sort of headless API through NetSuite.

The rise of JAMstack has had me think about this as well. The larger ecommerce ecosystem is so sophisticated that it would likely be easier to build this outside of NetSuite and just ETL-it in using an iPaaS like celigo or boomi.

Definitely. Yeah, the use of Celigo with another platform is definitely on our radar as probably the best way to make this happen. I figured that a headless API would be a great first step in transitioning to a more modern tech stack without needing to do a full migration of data, but that sadly doesn’t seem to exist.

It's not something we currently offer, no.

Got it, thanks for confirming.

We have 'thin' record APIs, which is what the connectors use so that third-party ecommerce apps, like Shopify, can be 'synced' with NetSuite.

That makes sense. And I’m definitely not in a position to speak for the industry as a whole, but our company would definitely be interested in that. We’d like to decouple our NetSuite instance and our storefront for a few reasons. We’re really interested in utilizing NextJS for some site optimizations with server side rendering and static site generation. SCA is also what I would consider to be an “append-only” framework, so while that works for many companies, we’ve found that we’ve customized so much over the years that we just have quite a bit of bloat since we can’t actually delete the code that no longer runs that is a part of the base SCA code. Obviously with headless, speed is extremely important, so we’d definitely be curious about what the performance is like if NetSuite were to offer this. At the end of the day though, I think that headless outside of NetSuite provides many complexities, like trying to sync a new ecommerce platform with NetSuite. Allowing our data to remain in NetSuite but giving us the full power to create our own storefront and really gain control over the customer experience sounds like the best of both worlds

Thanks for the insight

Steve, we’ve definitely been putting effort in to researching all the options re headless commerce, predominantly for the reasons Mitch has cited in this thread. Being a pure play ecommerce retailer, it’s particularly important to our business. Mitch sums up an ideal outcome well –  having a full featured, performant NetSuite Commerce API seems to be the missing piece in the equation. It would certainly avoid the added complexity (not to mention costs) of integrating another ecom platform, particularly when there’s a fair amount of cross-over in the functionality NetSuite and an ecom platform provides.