The challenge
The client had outgrown their Magento storefront. The codebase had become hard to change, mobile conversion lagged the industry benchmark by a wide margin, and every minor catalog change took two weeks to ship. Worse, the storefront struggled during regional campaigns where they wanted to differentiate copy, pricing, and promotion logic.
They wanted to keep the commerce backend (already integrated with their ERP and WMS) but replace the frontend with something modern, fast, and easy to change.
What we did
We split the work into three streams running in parallel.
1. Headless storefront on Next.js
We rebuilt the storefront on Next.js with server components, edge rendering on Cloudflare, and a commerce-API integration that wrapped their existing OMS. Catalog, pricing, and stock came from the same APIs Magento was using — just consumed by a faster, simpler frontend.
2. Search and merchandising
We replaced Magento's native search with Algolia, plus a small in-house admin UI for merchandisers to pin and re-rank products without engineering involvement. This single change drove the largest conversion lift in user testing.
3. Design system and accessibility
In parallel with engineering, our design team built a token-based design system covering all storefront surfaces, regional theme variants, and WCAG-AA accessibility. Every component shipped with Storybook documentation and a Playwright test suite.
Outcome
Three months after launch:
- Mobile conversion +102% vs the same quarter on Magento
- p95 TTFB dropped from 1.8s to 520ms globally
- 48,000 SKUs migrated and reconciled with zero data loss
- Release-to-prod time cut from 2 weeks to 1 day thanks to CI/CD and the new design system
The merchandising team now ships campaign-specific landing pages without engineering involvement — and the engineering team finally has the capacity to work on the things only they can do.