E-Commerce Scale-Up
Re-platforming a legacy Magento store to a headless Next.js storefront — 7× faster, 3.2× more conversions.
The Problem
A mid-market fashion retailer was haemorrhaging revenue through a deteriorating Magento 1 storefront. Average page load was clocking in at 8.2 seconds on mobile — well past the 3-second threshold where 53% of shoppers abandon. Their shared-hosting infrastructure struggled to cope with seasonal traffic spikes, causing outages during Black Friday that cost an estimated £180,000 in lost sales.
Beyond performance, their merchandising team was locked into a rigid CMS that required developer involvement for every product page update. The business had outgrown Magento 1 — it was time for a modern, scalable, headless architecture that put marketing in control and engineering out of the way.
The Architecture
We designed and built a fully headless storefront backed by a decoupled Node.js/Express commerce API. The front-end was built in Next.js 14 with the App Router, leveraging Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) to serve pre-rendered product pages with sub-second TTFB from Vercel's global edge network.
Product and inventory data was sourced from a purpose-built Node.js microservice backed by PostgreSQL, with Redis caching hot catalogue data near the edge. Stripe handled payments via Payment Intents API, with webhook-driven order fulfilment syncing to their 3PL warehouse system in real time.
A Sanity.io CMS was integrated as the content layer, giving merchandisers full control over landing pages, banners, and product stories through a visual editor — zero developer involvement. For search, we integrated Algolia with instant-search, typo-tolerance, and personalised ranking signals from purchase history, delivering relevant results in under 30ms.
Technology Stack
The Outcome
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