NORTHSTAR RETAIL · E-COMMERCE
Headless storefront rebuild that lifted conversion rate.
Replaced a monolithic shop with a composable Next.js storefront, tightened checkout, and pushed caching to the edge so EU shoppers stopped paying a latency tax at cart.
- Client
- Northstar Retail
- Sector
- Web Development · E-commerce
- Timeline
- 12 weeks
- Services
- Storefront engineering, CMS, edge performance
The challenge
Monolith UX capped AOV; EU latency capped trust
Northstar’s monolith handled Black Friday — technically — but PDP latency in the EU eroded conversion on high-AOV categories. Merchandising wanted editorial velocity; engineering feared every CMS field became a SQL join. Checkout abandonment sat stubbornly above benchmark despite discounts.
The CEO framed the trigger as “make premium feel premium online” before a partner channel launch. Twelve weeks to first composable release with no catalogue freeze longer than a weekend.
We kept Shopify as commerce truth and refused to fork pricing logic into a bespoke cart. Constraint: one CMS for storytelling; no second content swamp.
Our approach
Composable commerce with boring data paths and brave UX cuts
Framing. A storefront is a latency budget and a trust surface. We prioritised TTFB and checkout friction before visual novelty.
Architecture. Next.js storefront calling Shopify APIs, Sanity for editorial, Cloudflare for caching and WAF rules tuned with merchandising promos in mind. Inventory reads stayed near real-time; cache keys respected stock thresholds.
Phasing. Weeks 1–3: performance baseline + dead code removal. Weeks 4–8: PDP and PLP rebuild with component library. Weeks 9–12: checkout experiments and edge rollout.
Judgment. We killed a 3D product viewer that tanked LCP; marketing mourned briefly, finance did not.
The outcome
Conversion and checkout discipline moved in the same direction
Conversion rate on the rebuilt path rose 24% with SKU mix held constant in reporting. Checkout drop-off from cart to paid fell 39% after address validation and shipping logic were simplified. Mobile Lighthouse p75 on PDP templates reached 94; EU p95 TTFB improved 22% once edge caching rolled out.
Northstar’s team owns the design system now; we left a playbook for promo-week cache invalidation. Engagement continues with seasonal performance reviews rather than a standing dev army.
Results
Results in numbers
- conversion ratesame SKU set, A/B on checkout path
- +24%
- checkout drop-offfunnel from cart to paid
- -39%
- Lighthouse scorep75 mobile score on PDP templates
- 94
- P95 ttfb euedge-cached PDP vs. origin-only baseline
- -22%
What we learned
Honest postmortem on merchandising vs. engineering tension
We waited too long to involve store ops in shipping logic — their reality checks would have saved a week of rework. We were surprised how aggressively bot traffic skewed checkout tests; bot rules moved earlier in the plan.
Next time we would publish a single executive metric sheet (conversion, AOV, returns) before touching components — alignment tool more than a dashboard.
Tech stack
What shipped in production
- Next.js
- Shopify
- Sanity
- Cloudflare
Gallery
