The Challenge
RetailCo Global was running a 12-year-old monolithic commerce stack that buckled every Black Friday. With expansion into 14 new markets planned for the year, leadership needed a platform that could absorb 10x traffic spikes, support localised catalogues and pricing, and ship new features weekly rather than quarterly.
Our Approach
We replatformed onto a composable commerce architecture using Next.js on the storefront, a headless commerce engine, and a domain-driven set of services for catalogue, pricing, inventory, and order orchestration. Edge caching, image optimisation, and a custom CDN strategy were used to flatten latency across regions.
Technical Highlights
- Cell-based deployment topology that isolates failure domains per region.
- Real-time inventory aggregation across 240 warehouses with eventual-consistency guarantees tuned per category.
- ML-driven personalisation surfacing relevant products with 38ms average inference latency.
- Feature-flagged release pipeline enabling 60+ production deploys per week.
Results
Year-over-year revenue grew 120%, p75 page load dropped from 4.2s to 1.6s, and the conversion rate increased 45%. The platform absorbed a 6.8x peak traffic surge on launch day with zero downtime.
Lessons Learned
Pre-warming caches and load-testing against synthetic peak-day traffic two weeks ahead of launch was the single largest contributor to a smooth go-live.