How ELIVTECH helped a multi-brand retailer move off a decade-old Magento 1 monolith that could no longer be patched or scaled. A headless Next.js and Shopify Plus architecture cut page load time by 82%, tripled the share of mobile visitors who completed a purchase, and gave the platform ten times the peak capacity it had before — which it needed on its first sale weekend.
A leading multi-brand retail group operating 200+ brick-and-mortar stores had built its digital presence on a heavily customised Magento 1 installation. By the time they engaged ELIVTECH, that platform was consuming $2M per year in maintenance, buckling every Black Friday at 50,000 concurrent users, and forcing a 12-week release cycle that kept the marketing team permanently one quarter behind. ELIVTECH architected and delivered a full headless commerce migration - zero-downtime, incrementally traffic-switched over 90 days - resulting in sub-second storefronts, a 158% uplift in mobile conversion, and a platform now proven at 500,000+ concurrent users.
At a glance
The challenge
A legacy platform that was a liability at every level - performance, agility, and cost.
Performance wall
Average page load time of 6.2 seconds - more than 3x the 2-second benchmark at which conversion rates begin to fall sharply. Peak load capacity capped at 50,000 concurrent users, making every promotional event a crisis.
Mobile conversion gap against desktop, before the rebuild
Mobile accounted for the majority of sessions yet converted at just 1.2% versus 3.5% on desktop. With mobile commerce now representing 59% of global e-commerce sales (Statista, 2025), this gap was costing millions in recoverable revenue every quarter.
Glacial time-to-market
Shipping a new feature took 12 weeks on average due to tight coupling across the monolith. The marketing team could not respond to trends; the engineering team spent most cycles on maintenance rather than product development.
Maintenance cost spiral
$2M per year in Magento 1 support, custom patching, and infrastructure band-aids - money that generated no competitive advantage.
Search experience failures
The native Magento search could not handle typos, synonyms, or faceted filtering at scale. Shoppers with search intent - who convert at up to 3x the rate of browsers - were leaving empty-handed.
PCI & compliance risk
A heavily patched Magento 1 codebase with end-of-life support created growing PCI DSS audit risk and required disproportionate security engineering time.
Our solution
A composable, headless commerce architecture - built for speed, maintained with confidence, and scaled without limits.
Discovery & Architecture Design
Two-week deep-dive: traffic analysis, SKU taxonomy review, 3rd-party integration audit, and Core Web Vitals baselining. Output: a composable architecture blueprint with a vendor-neutral API contract layer.
Headless Storefront Build
Next.js 14 storefront with React Server Components and Incremental Static Regeneration, deployed to Vercel's edge network. Pages serve from the CDN edge closest to the user, achieving Time to First Byte (TTFB) under 80ms globally.
Commerce & Search Migration
Backend migrated to Shopify Plus for catalogue, inventory, and checkout. Algolia AI Search replaced native Magento search - delivering typo-tolerance, instant faceting, and merchandising rules. Early Algolia deployments of this type have shown 33% search conversion uplifts (Algolia, 2024).
Data & Personalisation Layer
2M product SKUs, 5 years of order history, and 800K customer accounts migrated with zero data loss. Segment CDP integrated for unified customer profiles; a custom ML recommendation model surfaced personalised product suggestions on home, PDP, and cart pages.
Technology stack
Results
Quantified outcomes measured 90 days post full-traffic cutover against the pre-migration baseline.
Before vs. After: Key Performance Metrics
- Magento 1 monolith - 6.2s average page load
- 50,000 concurrent user ceiling - Black Friday outages
- 12-week feature release cycle
- 1.2% mobile conversion rate
- $2M annual platform maintenance cost
- End-of-life security risk; manual PCI compliance effort
- Zero personalisation; one-size-fits-all storefront
- Next.js + Shopify Plus headless - 1.1s average page load
- 500,000+ concurrent user capacity - Black Friday handled without incident
- 2-week feature release cycle; independent frontend deploys in hours
- 3.1% mobile conversion rate (+158%)
- Platform maintenance cost reduced by ~80%
- Shopify Plus PCI Level 1 compliance; continuous security monitoring via Datadog
- ML-powered product recommendations; personalised landing pages via Segment CDP
Project timeline
Discovery & Architecture
Traffic and integration audit, Core Web Vitals baseline, headless architecture design, vendor selection (Shopify Plus, Algolia, Vercel), data migration planning for 2M SKUs and 800K customer accounts.
Foundation Build
Next.js storefront scaffolding, Shopify Plus configuration, Algolia index build and tuning, CI/CD pipeline on Vercel, feature-flag infrastructure via LaunchDarkly for safe incremental rollout.
Data Migration & Integration
Zero-downtime migration of 2M product SKUs, 5 years of order history, and 800K customer accounts. Parallel systems running simultaneously; traffic routed by feature flag. Segment CDP integration and ML recommendation model training.
Incremental Traffic Cutover
Traffic migrated incrementally from 5% to 100% over 10 weeks using LaunchDarkly flags. Real-time Datadog dashboards monitored error rate, latency, and revenue per session. Rollback capability maintained throughout.
Optimisation & Handover
Core Web Vitals tuning (LCP < 1.5s, INP < 200ms, CLS < 0.1), Algolia merchandising rules, A/B testing framework setup, team enablement, and documentation handover to the client's in-house engineering team.
The migration eliminated an entire category of operational anxiety. We used to dread every promotional event; now our team focuses on features, not firefighting. The headless architecture gives us a genuine competitive advantage we can measure in revenue. - Head of Digital Commerce, Multi-Brand Retail Group
Key takeaways
What made this modernisation succeed
- Parallel systems, not big bang: Running old and new platforms simultaneously with feature-flag traffic routing eliminated migration risk and enabled instant rollback at every stage.
- Mobile-first architecture pays dividends: With mobile accounting for nearly 60% of global e-commerce traffic (Statista, 2025), a 158% mobile conversion lift translates directly to material revenue recovery.
- Search is a revenue lever, not a commodity: Replacing native search with Algolia AI Search reduced null-result rates and drove measurable uplift in add-to-cart from search sessions.
- Composable > monolithic for agility: Decoupling the frontend from the commerce backend cut time-to-market from 12 weeks to 2 - restoring the marketing team's ability to respond to market opportunities.
- Performance has a direct price tag: Research shows a 1-second delay in mobile load time can impact conversion rates by up to 20% (Google/SOASTA). Fixing a 5-second delay compounds these gains significantly.
- Data migration fidelity is non-negotiable: Migrating 800K customer accounts and 5 years of order history with zero loss protected loyalty programme integrity and post-migration personalisation quality.
Want results like these?
Let's discuss how ELIVTECH can drive measurable outcomes for your business.
Start your project