Northbound
Headless replatform for a 40-market outdoor retailer
Moved a nine-year-old monolithic storefront to a headless Shopify architecture with a custom B2B wholesale portal on top. Rebuilt checkout around local payment methods per market and wired the ERP so stock and pricing stopped drifting overnight.
Results
- Checkout conversion
- +31%Checkout conversion
- LCP on 4G mobile, from 4.8s
- 1.4sLCP on 4G mobile, from 4.8s
- Organic traffic lost at cutover
- 0%Organic traffic lost at cutover
- Campaign setup, from 3 days
- Same dayCampaign setup, from 3 days
The challenge
What we walked into.
Northbound sold into forty markets from a single storefront built nine years earlier. Every campaign change went through a developer ticket, and the release train ran monthly, so seasonal merchandising was always late.
Checkout was the bigger problem. One card processor served every market, which meant no iDEAL in the Netherlands, no Bancontact in Belgium and no Klarna in Germany. Conversion in their three largest European markets sat well below the segment average, and nobody could say by how much because the funnel was not instrumented.
Behind the storefront, stock and pricing arrived from SAP as a nightly CSV. Overselling during campaigns was routine, and the customer service team absorbed it. Meanwhile wholesale buyers, a third of revenue, placed orders by emailing spreadsheets to account managers.
The approach
What we actually did.
- 01
Headless, but not homeless
We kept Shopify for payments, tax and fraud, and took ownership of the storefront with Hydrogen. That let merchandising, content and the front end move at different speeds without another replatform in three years.
- 02
Migration as a redirect problem
We crawled 41,000 indexed URLs, mapped every one to a destination, and diffed the map against staging until it came back empty. Structured-data parity was asserted in the test suite rather than checked by hand.
- 03
Checkout rebuilt per market
Adyen replaced the single processor, with local methods enabled market by market: iDEAL, Bancontact, Klarna and wallets. Every step of the funnel was instrumented before launch so the change could be measured rather than argued about.
- 04
Real-time ERP integration
The nightly CSV became an event-driven sync with idempotent replay, so stock and price changes reach the storefront in seconds and a failed message can be reprocessed without duplicating an order.
- 05
A wholesale portal, not an inbox
Company accounts, buyer roles, approval chains, contract pricing and purchase orders, so account managers stopped re-keying spreadsheets and buyers could self-serve.
- 06
Merchandising without developers
Algolia search with tuned ranking, plus collection, badge and campaign tooling the commercial team controls directly. Campaign setup no longer requires a deployment.
Stack
- Shopify Hydrogen
- Next.js
- Adyen
- Algolia
- SAP
- Cloudflare
The replatform went live on a Tuesday morning and organic traffic did not move. Checkout conversion did - up thirty-one percent by the end of the quarter.
Daniel V.
Commercial Director, Northbound
Practices used
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