E-Commerce Platform Redesign

Overview

Client: Northwind Retail. Role: Product consultant + lead engineer.

Goal: Modernize the storefront, increase conversion, and reduce operational overhead.

Highlights

• Performance: improved mobile load times with SSR + caching
• Accessibility: shipped WCAG AA patterns and automated checks
• Operations: replaced manual workflows with reliable automation

Delivery steps

1. Discovery workshops + analytics review
2. Design system + component architecture
3. Implementation + QA + phased rollout

Outcome: more confident releases, faster pages, and a clearer purchase journey.

Over the course of six months I partnered with the leadership team at Northwind Retail to rebuild their e commerce platform from the ground up. The company had outgrown a patchwork of legacy plugins that slowed every release cycle and frustrated both shoppers and internal staff. My role combined product discovery, technical architecture, and delivery leadership, so the first deliverable was a comprehensive assessment that mapped customer journeys, catalog operations, and fulfillment workflows. By conducting stakeholder interviews and reviewing analytics I uncovered over forty friction points that explained abandoned carts, support tickets, and poor repeat purchase rates.

Before touching a single line of code I facilitated design thinking workshops with marketing, merchandising, and customer success teams. These sessions produced aligned success metrics, clarified the brand voice, and resulted in a prioritized roadmap that balanced conversion optimization with operational efficiency. We defined key scenarios such as first time visitor exploration, returning customer reorder, and high volume seasonal promotions. I translated those journeys into user stories with clear acceptance criteria, mapped dependencies, and broke them into two week milestones that kept stakeholders informed without overwhelming them with technical jargon.

With product strategy agreed upon I architected a modular Next.js front end backed by a headless commerce stack powered by Shopify Hydrogen and custom Node.js middleware. The previous monolithic theme generated six second load times on mobile devices, so I implemented a design system with reusable React components, server side rendering, incremental static regeneration, and aggressive edge caching on Vercel. Accessibility was a non negotiable requirement, so every component shipped with semantic HTML, keyboard navigation, and automated testing via Axe and Playwright. We also introduced rich merchandising capabilities such as dynamic bundles, personalized recommendations, and video storytelling blocks that marketing could update without developer assistance.

Data integrity was a recurring pain point for the client, especially around inventory accuracy and pricing during flash promotions. I implemented a robust synchronization layer using Postgres and Hasura to unify product, warehouse, and loyalty data, exposing it to the storefront via strongly typed GraphQL endpoints. A message queue built on BullMQ handled spikes in order volume, while audit trails and alerting dashboards gave the operations team real time visibility into anomalies. We eliminated manual CSV uploads and replaced them with secure automation that ran every fifteen minutes, reducing support escalations by eighty percent within the first month of beta testing.

To make the experience tangible before engineering was complete I partnered closely with a senior designer to deliver interactive Figma prototypes and ClickUp documentation that captured visual language, animation patterns, and copy guidelines. These artefacts aligned cross functional teams, accelerated usability testing with real customers, and served as a living reference for QA. When development hit high gear we maintained a strict continuous integration pipeline with linting, type safety, unit tests, contract tests, and visual regression checks. Every pull request required approval from both engineering and design leads, ensuring that quality never became an afterthought.

Our go live plan followed a phased rollout strategy. We first launched to a cohort of loyalty members, monitored performance metrics, and collected qualitative feedback through Hotjar recordings and structured interviews. This allowed us to fine tune search relevance, campaign landing pages, and checkout microcopy before exposing the experience to the full customer base. Once we pressed the big red launch button the new platform handled a Black Friday surge that quadrupled normal traffic while maintaining sub two second load times and zero downtime. The leadership team credited the launch with unlocking their most profitable quarter to date.

Beyond the initial launch I documented a twelve month roadmap covering experimentation, international expansion, and enterprise integrations. We handed over detailed playbooks for content updates, campaign creation, and analytics storytelling to empower the in house team. Six months after launch the company reported a thirty two percent increase in conversion, a forty five percent lift in average order value, and a dramatic drop in support tickets. The project reminded me why crafting resilient, human centered commerce experiences is one of my favorite challenges, and the client continues to partner with me for iterative enhancements, including the next generation of their B2B portal.