Streamlining Ecommerce Across Borders for a Renowned Beauty Retailer
From legacy systems to lightning-fast rollouts: the transformation story of a global health and beauty powerhouse modernizing ecommerce.
Quick Info
Client
A leading global health and beauty retailer with 12 brands operating across 28 markets in Europe and Asia under a unified technical infrastructure. Each regional ecommerce platform is tailored to local markets, but all brands are built on a shared codebase to streamline development and ensure consistency.
Need
The client aimed to accelerate the development of one specific brand within their global portfolio, scaling its ecommerce presence, improving performance, and enabling faster delivery of new features in a competitive local market. This had to be done within a shared codebase environment used by all brands across 28 markets.
While the primary goal was to evolve a single brand, every technical decision had to account for the broader architecture, requiring extra care to avoid disruptions and ensure compatibility across the group’s unified infrastructure.
Solution
The idea behind implementing a shared codebase supporting multiple brands across diverse markets was to speed up the launch of new platforms, streamline common feature rollouts, and simplify ongoing maintenance. While future-proof, this approach came with specific limitations and required extra attention to testing and deployment pipelines.
Expert Soft’s team also had to deal with these specifics when working with one of the group’s flagship ecommerce brands: a feature-rich online beauty and pharmacy store operating in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Built on SAP Commerce Cloud, the project involved not only developing new features but also performing version upgrades and tackling five layers of caching. Each layer required careful tuning and invalidation to ensure content remained fresh and accurate.
During the project, our team led several critical system improvements that brought substantial, long-lasting enhancements to platform stability and performance.
Key milestones
Data import was overloading the main SAP Commerce Cloud app, affecting overall performance. To fix this, our team carved out the import logic into a dedicated microservice.
Offloading the heavy lifting streamlined platform operations and ensured more efficient data handling as well as reduced system strain and delivered a more responsive and future-ready architecture.
We introduced SmartEdit to give business users more control over content visibility. But one page type lost its restriction settings — critical for scheduling time-sensitive campaigns.
Our team dug into the custom SAP Commerce code, simplified the logic, and brought restrictions back to life. Now, marketers can confidently plan and launch content right on schedule, without disruptions.
The client needed a full storefront redesign to match new branding: colors, logos, banners, the works. While the visual updates were clear-cut, ensuring consistent styling across countless reusable components was the real challenge.
Our team built a custom Groovy script to automate color and style updates, applying the new brand palette across the board. This eliminated manual rework and guaranteed uniformity, ensuring a seamless rollout delivered on time.
To improve delivery flow and manage system load, we:
- Integrated address validation via PostNL with caching to reduce external system dependency.
- Rolled out a dynamic delivery pricing model to redistribute demand during peak days.
- Consolidated multiple delivery types into a unified Zone Delivery Mode with custom behavior controls.
Together, these efforts strengthened platform stability, improved customer experience, and ensured efficient, scalable operations within the constraints of a globally shared codebase.
AI-Powered Features
As part of a broader effort to modernize the ecommerce experience and enhance customer engagement, the business introduced two AI-driven tools: a virtual makeup try-on and an AI-powered chatbot. These features were designed to enrich the online shopping journey while easing the load on customer support teams.
The virtual try-on tool enables users to preview cosmetics in real time, directly within the storefront. This required seamless integration with the existing front-end and back-end layers to ensure responsiveness, accuracy, and performance consistency across devices. Our team aligned the tool’s functionality with the current tech stack, enabling a frictionless user experience without disrupting core platform components.
In parallel, we integrated an AI-based chatbot to assist with customer inquiries, providing real-time responses and reducing reliance on human agents for routine questions. The chatbot was embedded in the storefront interface and connected to back-end services, ensuring accurate data retrieval and smooth communication across systems.
Both integrations were executed with full alignment to platform standards, allowing the business to adopt cutting-edge tools without compromising operational stability. Together, these features improved user satisfaction, increased on-site engagement, and helped cost-effectively scale support capabilities.
Challenges
Performance bottlenecks from third-party customer support integrations
One of the recurring challenges faced by our team stemmed from third-party customer support integrations, which introduced latency into the system. These external services, used to provide real-time order status updates or personalized product interactions, could not always keep pace with platform demands. As a result, delays in data transmission began to affect customer service workflows and slowed response times for end users.
To address this, our team enhanced the observability of the affected systems. We improved the logging framework and increased log retention times. These upgrades allowed us to isolate the precise sources of delay across external service calls and pinpoint where breakdowns were occurring. Ultimately, system stability and traceability improved significantly, allowing customer service operations to function more reliably, even under heavy load.
Delivery flow disruption triggered by last-minute API changes
One of the key components of the ecommerce platform was its integration with an external delivery system responsible for managing store pickup options. This system played a crucial role in the customer journey, providing real-time pickup availability and enabling users to choose where and when to collect their orders.
However, just before a scheduled release, the external system made an unexpected change to its API response format. The new structure no longer matched the integration logic we built and tested. As a result, the communication between systems broke down, and the platform could no longer correctly interpret store pickup options.
To resolve the issue quickly and reliably, our team acted on multiple fronts. We conducted a detailed analysis of the delivery feature by reviewing code, building flow diagrams, and running tests in various environments to understand the system’s actual behavior. With this information, we were able to address mismatches and adjust the logic.
Thanks to the rapid and coordinated response, we were able to restore the delivery functionality in time for the launch. The system now handles store pickup options correctly under the new API structure, preserving the user experience.
Stock synchronization challenges during peak sales events
During sales events, our team pinpointed an issue: some items were available after being sold out. This was caused by discrepancies in stock updates.
To address the issue, our team developed custom cart-cleaning scripts designed specifically for post-sale scenarios. These scripts automatically removed expired or out-of-stock items from customer carts after high-volume events, ensuring that the front-end inventory reflected actual availability. This not only reduced the risk of overselling but also helped maintain trust in the platform’s accuracy without introducing manual operational overhead.
Results
Technologies
SAP Commerce Cloud, Java, Spring, Spring Boot, Hibernate, JPA, Kafka, ActiveMQ, Micronaut, Groovy, SmartEdit, Bloomreach, Polyglot, REST
