The team was busy maintaining yesterday, not building tomorrow.
GlobalE had grown faster than their stack. A heavily-customized Magento install — once a competitive advantage — had become a productivity tax. Every release took two days. Checkout was slow enough that mobile users abandoned at a 78% rate. The technical leadership was spending all their time on infrastructure, not on the things that move the business.
The mandate from the CEO was direct: rebuild for speed, do it without breaking holiday traffic, and give the team a stack they can iterate on for the next ten years.
Headless commerce —
but quietly.
We took the data layer that worked (Magento as a product source-of-truth) and unbundled everything else. New storefront in Next.js, edge-rendered on Vercel. New checkout in Stripe-native React. Search by Algolia. Image pipeline through Cloudflare. The team kept their familiar admin; the customer got a brand-new experience.
Migration ran in parallel — we rebuilt category by category, with feature flags routing traffic gradually. By week 12 we were serving 30% of traffic from the new stack. By week 14, 100% — and the old one was decommissioned on a Tuesday afternoon with no customer noticing.
What 0.8 seconds
is worth.
Checkout latency dropped from 3.2s to 0.8s at the 95th percentile. Mobile abandonment fell from 78% to 41%. Conversion rate lifted 47% in the first 90 days — and held. Average order value went up 18% as the new product detail pages improved cross-sell.
Beyond the numbers: the engineering team ships features now. Their deploy cadence went from twice a week to twice a day. They've added internationalization, a B2B portal, and a subscription program in the six months since launch — all using the same infrastructure we set up.
“We didn't just get a faster site. We got our engineering team back.”
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