One of the interesting struggles I see in the space comes from companies that managed to grow on Shopify or BigCommerce, but then reach the limits of those platforms, and looking out into the enterprise space, they get hit with sticker shock, because there's a notable chasm between a Shopify Plus and something like Adobe Commerce or Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It's a little different when you're using those at an enterprise scale, where the cost and performance hits that come with 30+ Shopify Apps, or having to gaze into a crystal ball and give Adobe your best guess at how much infrastructure you'll need next quarter, but if you're a digitally native brand that's grown up on SaaS ecommerce, getting out of the kiddie pool usually means a big change in tech investment.
Of course, everyone in the space is scrambling to say they're headless, because commercetools has absolutely changed the conversation in the ecommerce space, but it's not some magic bullet. It's an architectural decision that should be informed by business needs, e.g. supporting multiple regions, multiple brands, or sharing one backend between your website, app, and in-store experiences. Handily, it does serve as a salve to front-end issues inherent to the all-in-one approach that was so dominant a decade ago. By decoupling the frontend from platforms like Shopify Plus or Salesforce, you get a taste of the speed and freedom that comes with a modern front-end, but also quickly run into no-go zones where even in 2022, there's no API access to important backend features - because there never will be, because that messes with the business model of these platforms.
On the bright side, even taking legacy monolithic platforms like that headless will make it easier to migrate to a more robust API-first backend solution when the time comes.
It certainly makes the most sense with the Nikes and the AT&Ts of the world. Substituting something like commercetools in for their in-house ecommerce systems offsets a huge amount of technical debt, and lets internal teams focus on being more effective at doing whatever makes Nike different from Puma. And while a digital transformation to a MACH approach sometimes has a higher up front cost, companies are clamoring to get away from the millions they spend in maintenance on versioned legacy stacks like Hybris and Salesforce.