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

Client

A leading French cosmetics retailer managing distinct online storefronts across multiple 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 without disrupting the live production environment.

The migration also had to work inside a live, multi-site production setup where content, blog media, search visibility, localized storefront behavior, and customer-facing flows had to remain stable across old and new storefronts.

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, forms, and media readiness

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.

Media readiness became part of the same Spartacus preparation work. On the Spartacus home page, image tags relied on back-end media metadata for width and height values. Because the media metadata job had not been configured for the Spartacus site, images could render without these attributes, creating layout shift risk during page load and affecting UX and Core Web Vitals readiness.

We enabled and configured a modified SAP Commerce rendition job that iterated through catalog media and wrote width and height values into the database. Once this metadata was available to the front-end, Spartacus could render home-page images with the expected dimensions instead of depending on late layout recalculation.

3. Blog media 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, users could not find blog content through search, and search visibility for that content was 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 and made blog pages discoverable through the new storefront search flow.

Production blog media requests added another layer of complexity. Blog images were served through a dedicated endpoint that fetched content from WordPress. In production, those requests passed through Akamai, while lower environments followed a different path. When SAP Commerce Cloud served media without base-site context in the session, it could not consistently resolve the correct media for the storefront.

To close that gap, Akamai detected the site from the URL pattern and injected a custom base-site header. SAP Commerce read that header, set the base site in the session, and served the correct WordPress media. The fix treated CDN routing and application context as one production flow, not as separate configuration details.

4. Production Monitoring

Beyond the storefront migration itself, Expert Soft also watched how the live system behaved after changes reached production. One signal stood out during monitoring: Noibu showed repeated 403 errors on the payment step when customers used e-gift cards, often with several gift cards applied to one order and the full amount covered by gift cards.

The team did not treat these errors as background noise. First, the expert reviewed Noibu session recordings to reconstruct the checkout flow: how gift cards were entered, attached to the order, and rejected. Because Noibu exposed gift card codes but not customer identities, the expert then queried the database by those codes and found a large pattern of customers and orders tied to similarly structured email addresses.

At that point, the signal could have indicated a real production risk: automated behavior around gift card usage, a payment-flow issue, or an overly aggressive security rule affecting legitimate customers. The team compared the findings with older unresolved tickets, collected the evidence, and escalated the case to managers and the security team.

The investigation later confirmed that these were B2B “global shoppers” using gift cards through scripts, with Akamai WAF intermittently blocking requests. The important part was not a new migration feature, but the operating discipline around the platform: when customer-facing behavior looked suspicious, Expert Soft followed the signal across monitoring, database evidence, historical support context, and security validation before closing the loop.

Technologies

SAP Commerce Cloud, Spartacus, Angular, WordPress, Akamai, Noibu

Conclusion

The migration from JSP to Spartacus was not only a front-end replacement. It required careful coexistence between legacy and new storefronts, controlled CMS and media behavior, stable blog and search access, and attention to how the platform behaved in production.

By combining parallel rollout, site-level content control, backend context handling, media readiness, and active production monitoring, Expert Soft helped the retailer modernize its storefront architecture without losing visibility into the operational details that keep an ecommerce platform stable.