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E-Commerce

Rebuilding a Legacy Monolith into a Headless Commerce Engine

A Series B e-commerce company was losing revenue to slow load times and a checkout experience that hadn't been touched in four years. We rebuilt their storefront from the ground up — headless Shopify, Next.js SSG, and AWS CloudFront — without taking the business offline for a single day.

Next.jsShopifyAWS

Outcome

60% faster page loads, 25% conversion increase

The Challenge

A Monolith That Couldn't Keep Up With Growth

The company's original platform was a heavily customized Magento 2 installation that had served them well through early growth. By the time revenue hit $12M ARR, it had become an active liability: slow, fragile, and impossible to iterate on without breaking something else.

  • —Page load times averaged 6.2 seconds on mobile — above the threshold where Google penalizes organic rankings and users abandon carts
  • —The checkout flow required 7 steps with no guest checkout option, causing 68% cart abandonment on first-time purchases
  • —Inventory sync between Shopify POS and the storefront ran on a scheduled job every 15 minutes, regularly showing stock that didn't exist
  • —Any storefront deployment required a 45-minute maintenance window, limiting the team to two deploys per week

Architecture

A Headless Stack Built for Performance and Reliability

We replaced the Magento monolith with a composable architecture that separates the commerce engine from the frontend — giving the team independent deploy cycles, CDN-level performance, and real-time inventory accuracy.

Headless Shopify

Shopify serves as the commerce backbone: products, inventory, orders, and payments — accessed via the Storefront API. This eliminates custom commerce logic while retaining full Shopify ecosystem compatibility.

Next.js SSG Storefront

The storefront is statically generated at build time using Next.js, with Incremental Static Regeneration for product pages. Pages are pre-rendered HTML served from the edge — not PHP generated on demand.

AWS CloudFront CDN

All static assets and HTML pages are served through CloudFront with 30+ edge locations. Cache hit rate exceeds 94% for product pages, bringing P95 load times below 800ms globally.

Event-Driven Inventory Sync

Shopify webhooks trigger an AWS Lambda function that updates inventory counts in real time via the Storefront API. Batch reconciliation runs hourly as a safety net — eliminating the 15-minute staleness window.

Atomic Deployment Pipeline

GitHub Actions triggers Vercel deployments on every merge to main. Each deployment is atomic — the old version stays live until the new one is fully built and verified. Zero maintenance windows.

Edge Middleware

Next.js Edge Middleware handles A/B testing, geo-based currency switching, and bot detection at the CDN layer — before any compute is involved. Response time overhead: under 2ms.

Our Approach

An Incremental Migration That Never Took the Store Offline

We ran the old and new storefronts in parallel for eight weeks, shifting traffic gradually using weighted DNS routing. This let us validate performance and conversion metrics in production before fully cutting over — with an instant rollback path at every stage.

01

Chose Next.js SSG over SSR for product pages — predictable performance at scale without cold-start latency; ISR handles the long-tail catalog

02

Retained Shopify as the commerce engine rather than switching to a custom backend — faster delivery, maintained POS integration, and access to Shopify's fraud detection

03

Implemented edge caching at the CDN layer rather than client-side caching — no stale data in user browsers, consistent experience across devices

04

Used weighted DNS traffic shifting instead of feature flags — allowed clean A/B measurement of the new storefront against the baseline before full cutover

Results

Measurable Impact Across Every Metric That Matters

60%

Reduction in page load time

25%

Increase in conversion rate

99.9%

Storefront uptime post-launch

3x

Mobile revenue in 90 days

The new storefront went fully live with zero downtime. Within 90 days, mobile revenue had tripled — driven by faster load times, a streamlined 3-step checkout, and real-time inventory accuracy that eliminated customer service tickets about out-of-stock orders.

Ready to Rebuild Your Commerce Stack?

Tell us about your current storefront constraints and we will scope a migration plan that delivers measurable performance improvements without business disruption.

Start a Conversation

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