Ecommerce website development that grew online orders 2.4x

The problem: a store that could not keep up

The store ran on an older platform the business had outgrown. Most shoppers came in on their phones, and on a phone the pages loaded slowly. In the busiest sales, when traffic jumped, checkout slowed to a crawl or stopped working altogether, on the very days the retailer expected to sell the most.

Changing anything was slow too. Every new banner or promotion needed a developer, so the marketing team waited days for simple updates. The stock levels shown on the site also drifted away from what the warehouse actually held, and some orders had to be cancelled.

We used what's called a headless commerce design. The shop window your customers see is kept separate from the engine behind it, which handles products, prices, stock, orders and payments. The two talk through APIs (application programming interfaces, the standard way one system asks another for data). That means the marketing team can publish new pages without going anywhere near the checkout.

When traffic rises, Amazon Web Services (AWS) adds servers by itself. Orders go straight through to the warehouse, so nobody has to type them in again.

Protecting search rankings

Search engines and shoppers' bookmarks still pointed at the old product and category addresses. We set up permanent redirects so each old address sends visitors and search engines to its new page, and we checked the site in search tools before and after launch.

Security and quality checks

Card details never touch the store: they stay with the payment provider. Staff only get the admin access their role needs. Before any change reaches shoppers, it passes automated tests in a CI/CD pipeline (an automated process that tests and releases each update).