Seamless Migration from Legacy JSP to Spartacus for a Leading French Cosmetics Retailer

Client

A leading French cosmetics retailer managing distinct online storefronts tailored to various markets.

Need

The client needed to modernize its ecommerce experience by migrating from a legacy JSP-based storefront to Spartacus — an Angular-based front-end framework. The goal was to improve maintainability, isolate front-end and back-end concerns, and support long-term scalability, all without disrupting the live production environment.

Solution

To ensure a stable and seamless migration to Spartacus, the Expert Soft team implemented a multi-phase strategy, focusing on environment orchestration, content architecture, and critical third-party integrations.

1. Dual-environment setup and configuration inheritance

To prevent disruption during migration, we launched Spartacus storefronts in parallel with the legacy JSP-based websites. This dual-site architecture allowed development and testing to proceed safely without affecting live traffic or transactions. However, maintaining consistency between the two environments required robust parent-child logic.

We introduced fallback mechanisms enabling Spartacus storefronts to inherit essential configurations, such as SAP model relationships and account structures, from the legacy sites. This ensured customer sessions and account access worked seamlessly across both environments.

A critical challenge emerged during this period: the SAP Commerce upgrade introduced a change to the servlet library, breaking multi-language URL handling. The updated servlet failed to parse language prefixes in URLs, resulting in 404 errors on localized pages. We resolved this by engineering a custom patch that reinstated the parsing logic, restoring correct routing across all regional storefronts.

2. Content and form redesign

Besides the migration to Spartacus, the business required a complete redesign of the website. Nearly every page needed modifications because existing components, initially designed for Hybris Accelerator, were incompatible with Spartacus.

A significant challenge here was managing content changes in a shared content catalog without affecting the live legacy sites. Spartacus components had to coexist with legacy content without interference. To manage this, we applied precise CMS restrictions at the site level, ensuring that Spartacus-specific components rendered independently while legacy components remained untouched.

Additionally, the business required a full redesign of on-site forms to match the updated storefront design. Given the overlap in functionality across forms, we introduced a form inheritance mechanism to reuse shared components across pages. This minimized duplication, maintained visual consistency, and accelerated development.

The multi-site nature of the setup, covering multiple business units across regions, also required us to configure multi-site restrictions for shared components. This allowed selective reuse of elements across storefronts while preserving localized variations.

3. WordPress blog integration and search restoration

Another challenge arose with the site’s blog section. The existing WordPress integration was initially configured to serve only the legacy storefronts, leaving Spartacus sites without proper blog access or indexing. As a result, search functionality on the new storefronts was broken: users couldn’t find blog content, and SEO visibility was negatively affected.

We addressed this by implementing additional cron jobs that associated WordPress blog posts with both the legacy and Spartacus storefronts. This restored parity across environments, ensured that blog pages were fully discoverable, and reinforced SEO performance across the board.