Replatforming omnichannel commerce for a national retail group

Challenge

The client runs fourteen stores and a growing online business across three markets. Its monolithic commerce platform coupled storefront rendering, promotions and inventory logic in one deployment: every campaign needed a release window, product pages took over four seconds to load on mobile, and store stock was invisible to the web shop. Basket abandonment climbed while merchandising teams waited days for content changes.

The mandate was concrete: rebuild the storefront on a headless architecture, connect the ERP as the single source of truth for stock, and hold every page to a measurable performance budget.

Solution

A Vendenis team of six — four engineers, a designer and a technical lead — delivered the replatform in sixteen weeks. We separated the storefront from commerce logic behind a versioned API layer, rebuilt every template as server-rendered components with edge caching, and redesigned checkout as a three-step flow with address validation and saved payment methods. Promotions and content moved to a headless CMS that the merchandising team edits without releases.

Performance was governed rather than hoped for: every route carried a JavaScript and image budget enforced in CI, and any pull request that breached it failed the build.

Architecture

The platform runs as a set of focused services around the existing ERP, which remained the system of record.

• Server-rendered storefront with edge caching and per-route performance budgets
• Commerce API layer exposing catalog, pricing and cart operations behind versioned contracts
• Inventory sync service consuming ERP events into a unified stock view in under thirty seconds
• Headless CMS for merchandising content, promotions and landing pages
• Real-user monitoring wired to the same performance budgets as CI

Outcome

The storefront launched through a zero-downtime cutover behind a reversible traffic switch. Median page load time dropped 38 percent, checkout conversion rose 24 percent within eight weeks, and store associates and the web shop now read the same stock position at 99.9 percent accuracy. The retailer ships merchandising changes daily, and the performance budgets have held through every release since.