i'm looking for some advice from people who have actually built headless wordpress sites.

i'm working on a small experimental/art website for a client. i'm fairly new to building websites end-to-end — my background/strengths are much more in creative direction and design, and i'm currently vibe-coding a lot of the development. i do have a background in computer science but coding is def not my biggest strength.

the frontend is going to be completely custom react because the site has a pretty specific visual direction. the homepage has a custom interactive 3d element, and i don't want to be constrained by a wordpress theme.

there's also a small shop with around 20–30+ products.

what i'm thinking is basically -
wordpress/woocommerce would be responsible for the following:

• product catalogue
• inventory
• prices
• product images
• orders
• client admin
• editable website content

and react would be responsible for:

• the entire visual frontend
• homepage / 3d interaction
• animations
• product pages
• shop UI
• cart
• potentially checkout

the main reason i'm considering this is that i absolutely do not want to build the admin/cms/inventory/order infrastructure myself.

the client has also explicitly said they think shopify is too expensive, so woocommerce seems attractive because they can manage the store themselves without me having to build an admin system.

for payment/shipping, i'm also open to using something like razorpay, shiprocket, etc. rather than trying to build or own that infrastructure myself.

my main question is whether wordpress + woocommerce is actually a good backend for this kind of setup.

for the non-commerce content, would you use regular wordpress pages/custom post types + acf? or is there a better way to structure content that a headless react frontend can consume?

and for anyone who has done this:

• did clients find the wordpress/woocommerce admin easy enough to use?
• did you run into problems with plugins because the frontend was headless?
• how painful was maintenance?
• would you choose wordpress/woocommerce again for a small headless site?

i'm basically trying to avoid getting 70% of the way through the frontend and then discovering that the backend architecture is going to make everything horrible ;-;

would love to hear from anyone who's actually done this in production.