Headless commerce that doubled their conversion rate.
A growing D2C brand was capped by their legacy storefront — 4-second page loads, no personalisation, and a checkout that lost 60% of carts. We replatformed onto headless architecture in 60 days. Conversion 2.8×'d. Cart abandonment halved.
Conversion rate
Mobile page load (p75)
Cart abandonment cut
What was breaking
The client had built revenue on a legacy WooCommerce storefront with seven plugins fighting each other. Page loads averaged 4.2 seconds on mobile (their primary channel). 60% of users abandoned at checkout. They couldn't run dynamic pricing experiments because every change required a deploy. Black Friday traffic crashed the site for 6 hours, costing them ~₹40L in lost revenue. The CTO needed an architecture that could scale 10× without a rewrite.
The technical bets we made
- 1
Replatformed onto a headless architecture: Next.js + GraphQL frontend, with the existing WooCommerce kept as the order-of-record (no data migration risk).
- 2
Moved product catalog onto Elasticsearch with ML-driven 'people also bought' and personalised recommendations based on browse + purchase history.
- 3
Rebuilt checkout as a single-page flow with persistent cart, address autocomplete, UPI + cards + EMI in one screen. Cart abandonment dropped from 60% to 31%.
- 4
Set up GCP infrastructure with Cloudflare CDN edge caching for product pages — sub-200ms first paint globally.
- 5
Built a feature-flag service so the marketing team could ship dynamic pricing, hero variants, and seasonal banners without engineering involvement.
What powers this system
From kickoff to production
Performance audit, behavioural funnel analysis, competitor benchmark on the same product category.
Information architecture, design system, headless data model. Replicated their top 5 pages in clickable Figma prototypes.
Frontend rebuild + GraphQL layer + recommendation engine. Daily deploys to staging, weekly demos.
Phased traffic shift via Cloudflare workers. 10% → 50% → 100% across two weeks. Rollback path tested before each ramp.
The ROI
2.8× conversion on the same paid traffic budget = ₹3.4Cr incremental revenue in the first quarter post-launch (their numbers, not ours). Cart abandonment improvement alone recovered ~₹80L/quarter. The brand has since scaled paid spend 3× because the site now monetises that traffic — they couldn't before. ROI on the engagement: ~8× in 6 months.
“The thing that surprised me wasn't the conversion lift — it was that they refused to take a third of the work I asked for. They said it'd cost more than it would earn. I've never had an agency push back on revenue before.”
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