Scaling Omnichannel Ecommerce for a Top 100 Most Valuable Global Beauty Brand
A high-stakes ecommerce overhaul that brought speed, flexibility, and local relevance to three key markets while maintaining system stability and uninterrupted business continuity.
Quick Info
Client
A European luxury cosmetics brand operating multiple localized ecommerce storefronts across Austria, France, and Italy.
Need
After the migration to a new headless setup, the client needed support and maintenance services to ensure the stability of the system. Besides system health monitoring, the platform required new features implementation and smooth omnichannel operation.
Solution
The client operates a multi-country ecommerce platform powered by SAP Commerce Cloud, with a storefront built with Spartacus. To ensure system stability on the production and new features implementation according to the roadmap, our team worked across the full stack: back-end, front-end, and integrations. Collaborating closely with in-house developers, external vendors, and business stakeholders, we were building secure, scalable, and tailored solutions for Austria, France, and Italy.
Performance bottlenecks from third-party customer support integrations
Loyalty-driven personalization
To strengthen relationships with loyal customers, the business aimed to offer a personalized VIP experience across three distinct tiers. But managing separate pages for each level quickly became a maintenance headache.
So, we leveraged the SAP Commerce personalization mechanism that, with smart mapping, allowed a single loyalty page to dynamically adapt based on the customer’s segment. This delivered a tailored experience for every segment without multiplying the maintenance workload for the business team.
Role-based access for store consultants
Store consultants needed quick access to admin features to assist customers on the spot, but with constant staff turnover, managing individual accounts became a logistical nightmare.
To fix this, we integrated Azure ADFS for centralized, secure access. By shifting to role-based authentication, we eliminated the chaos of manual account management, ensured compliance, and gave consultants the tools they needed without the operational burden.
Store locator enhancement
As part of the omnichannel retail experience, we improved the store locator feature, ensuring high availability, faster load times, and accurate filtering by region and service type. This allowed users to find nearby store locations seamlessly across all devices.
Scalable architecture
The initial import process of handling product, customer, and configuration data was monolithic, fragile, and environment-bound. Even small updates required full redeployments, introducing risk and slowing releases.
We re-architected the process by extracting the logic into dedicated microservices. This shift decoupled import functionality from the SAP core, reduced deployment times, and allowed for environment-specific behavior control. It also enabled smoother CI/CD workflows and faster response to data update needs across markets.
System compliance
A change in Romanian tax law required ecommerce platforms to collect personal tax IDs (CNPs) for every purchase — a move that risked disrupting the checkout flow and frustrating international customers.
To stay compliant without hurting conversion rates, we built a smart dual-path validation at checkout. Shoppers could enter a valid CNP or use a fallback option in edge cases, keeping the experience smooth, legal boxes checked, and carts from being abandoned.
Integration of Key Third-Party Systems
To support seamless functionality across markets and enhance both user and admin experiences, we implemented and stabilized several complex third-party integrations spanning payments, reviews, scheduling, analytics, and authentication. Each integration required deep coordination, technical adaptation, and security-conscious execution within the headless Spartacus framework.
Payment systems
To give customers more flexibility at checkout, the business needed to support multiple payment options tailored to different shopping behaviors. We integrated Adyen to enable both standard online payments and a pay-in-store model, allowing users to reserve products online and complete the purchase in person within a set timeframe.
On top of that, we implemented Klarna, managing its front-end integration to support diverse European payment flows, including PayPal. Together, these integrations expanded payment flexibility and boosted overall customer convenience.
Reviews and intelligence systems
To enhance product credibility and customer engagement, we integrated two services for reviews:
Challenges
Back-end performance degradation from empty carts
During high-traffic campaigns, performance profiling revealed that thousands of abandoned empty carts were clogging system memory and degrading checkout speed. These carts, often created but never used, were being retained indefinitely, consuming database and cache resources.
To resolve this, we implemented an automated cart cleanup mechanism triggered by cart age and inactivity thresholds. This reduced unnecessary data retention, freed up system resources, and significantly improved back-end responsiveness during load spikes without affecting valid user sessions.
Token overwrites in user-agent workflows
Sales agents in physical stores used a special workflow to register customers directly through the website. However, after registration, the agent’s session was overwritten with the new user’s token, logging them in as the customer and breaking access to internal tools.
This behavior disrupted key omnichannel processes, introduced security risks, and caused session data inconsistencies. We traced the issue to a token collision in local storage and implemented a front-end fix that preserved the original agent token by storing it securely in a separate service and restoring it when needed.
Cache invalidation delays
The project architecture involved five cache layers across multiple environments, which made real-time content updates, especially during timed promotions, highly unreliable. Marketing teams often faced delays of several minutes before changes became visible on the storefront, undermining campaign accuracy and business expectations. The complexity was compounded by the lack of transparency into what was cached and where, making root-cause analysis difficult.
We reproduced the situation in controlled environments, collaborated with architects to map out cache behavior, and implemented a component-specific cache-clearing mechanism. We also introduced documentation and control over invalidation logic, enabling the business team to launch precise, time-sensitive updates without full-cache resets or technical intervention.
Google Analytics data inconsistency
The business reported major discrepancies between Google Analytics and the internal admin panel, with no clear root cause. We launched a full-stack investigation, reviewing everything from event tracking and data sync to user behavior and consent flows.
Two key findings emerged:
- Internally, canceled orders were still counted in revenue due to misaligned reporting logic.
- On the front-end, a third-party consent banner made the “Reject All” option too accessible, leading to unusually high opt-out rates.
The fix didn’t require code fixes, but we aligned reporting rules, updated tracking parameters, and improved the consent UI, resolving the issue with minimal disruption and restoring data integrity across systems.
SEO limitations in pagination
Product listing pages weren’t being fully indexed by search engines due to missing bot-specific pagination paths and improperly configured canonical URLs. As a result, large portions of the catalog remained invisible in organic search, negatively affecting traffic and discoverability.
The issue stemmed from Spartacus’s default rendering behavior, which didn’t generate unique, crawler-friendly pagination URLs. We analyzed the storefront structure and implemented SEO-compliant pagination logic and unique paths for bots. This ensured that all paginated content was rendered and indexed correctly across storefront variations, restoring full visibility in search results.
CMS-Based FAQ compatibility in Spartacus
The FAQ section, originally built for the Hybris Accelerator, depended on CMS-driven logic and dynamic rendering, both tightly coupled to the legacy front-end. When migrating to Spartacus, this structure became incompatible with the component-based architecture, preventing the FAQ from displaying or updating properly.
This issue directly affected customer support content and required both architectural review and functional redesign. We assessed how the legacy system fetched and rendered FAQs, then worked with the front-end team to adapt the integration approach. By realigning the logic with Spartacus rendering principles, we restored full FAQ functionality without compromising content management workflows in the CMS.
Results
Technologies
SAP Commerce Cloud, Spartacus (Angular), Java microservices, Adyen, Klarna, PowerReviews, Minut’Pass, Azure ADFS, Google Analytics, GTM, WordPress
