Case study · Headless Commerce
A European retail group
A legacy shop platform that buckled every sale season. We replatformed it step by step — without a single hour of downtime.
The mess we walked into
The group's e-commerce ran on a heavily customized legacy PHP platform that slowed to a crawl every sale season. The vendor had ended support, every promotion required manual deploys at 5 a.m., and a full rewrite had already failed once.
What we did
- Strangler-fig replatforming: new storefront and checkout built alongside the old system
- Traffic shifted gradually behind a routing layer — no cut-over day, no downtime
- Performance work first where it hurt most: search, listing, checkout
- Old platform decommissioned piece by piece after each migration step
Before / after
Sale-season stability slowdowns and firefighting boring — in the good way
Deployments 5 a.m. manual deploys automated, any time of day
Migration risk one failed big-bang rewrite incremental, reversible steps
Downtime during migration — zero
← All case studies"We had one failed rewrite behind us, so "step by step, no downtime" wasn't a sales line we believed — until they did it."
E-commerce Director, retail group, EU
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