Transforming Ecommerce Platform for a Global Medical Tech Provider
As a legacy SAP Commerce platform became harder to scale, maintain, and adapt, Expert Soft stepped in to strengthen it for growth, performance, and ongoing change.
Quick Insights
Client
The client is a global medical technology company operating an ecommerce platform for medical equipment parts and medical devices across multiple regions.
Client Need
The client’s ecommerce platform had evolved over time into a heavily customized SAP Commerce environment. However, its legacy foundation was no longer keeping pace with growing traffic, expanding business requirements, and the increasing complexity of the surrounding system landscape, making the platform harder to scale, maintain, and adapt.
The client needed a modernization effort that would strengthen platform performance, simplify maintenance, support global growth, and make it easier to introduce new business functionality without disrupting ongoing operations.
Technical Specifics
The modernization effort had to work within a complex technical landscape shaped by legacy customizations, multiple connected systems, and country-specific business logic. The solution had to account for:
- a heavily customized SAP Commerce environment, where legacy implementations had to be upgraded and improved without breaking existing functionality;
- multi-system architecture, including integrations with Sitecore, internal pricing and content systems, custom payment logic, and third-party platforms such as Aptos;
- global and country-specific behavior, requiring support for multilingual content, regional product visibility, finance logic, checkout variations, and localized communication flows;
- ongoing business-driven changes that had to be delivered without destabilizing the platform.
The task was not to rebuild the platform, but to modernize it in place while keeping it stable and ready for further growth.
Solution Overview
As part of ecommerce website development services, Expert Soft helped the client modernize a legacy SAP Commerce platform and adapt it to growing traffic, evolving business needs, and global operational complexity. Rather than focusing on a single improvement area, the work covered several interconnected layers of the platform:
- platform upgrades and legacy customization support
- front-end transformation
- performance optimization,
- business-critical custom flows implementation,
- regional and multilingual support,
- security and maintainability improvements.
This approach turned the platform into a stronger foundation for ongoing business growth without requiring a full rebuild.
Core Areas
Platform modernization and upgrade continuity
One of the key focus areas was keeping the platform modern and upgrade-ready without disrupting its existing business logic. When Expert Soft joined the project, the ecommerce solution was still running on an outdated SAP Commerce version, Hybris 6. As part of the long-term modernization effort, the platform was continuously upgraded to SAP Commerce 22.11.
Because the solution had accumulated a significant number of legacy customizations over time, the upgrade process also required reviewing and updating outdated custom files to keep the platform compatible and stable as modernization continued. This allowed the system to evolve without breaking critical functionality or creating additional issues during future upgrades.
Front-end transformation
Another important modernization stream focused on the front-end layer. The original ecommerce solution relied on a server-side rendered approach, which limited flexibility and made further evolution harder as business and UX requirements grew. To support a more modern and scalable storefront, the front-end was transformed into a React-based single-page application.
This shift introduced a more dynamic user experience and created a stronger foundation for ongoing interface improvements. Analytics also showed that with the SPA, customers reached the payment stage more frequently, boosting engagement and purchase rates.
To make this front-end layer easier to develop and maintain over time, the work also included several supporting improvements:
- a custom component library to standardize reusable UI elements across projects, reduce redundant coding, and streamline the rollout of new features across the platform,
- refactoring React class components into functional components to align the codebase with more modern development standards,
- front-end testing with React Testing Library to improve stability and reduce the risk of regressions as the platform evolved.
Together, these changes made the storefront more flexible for future development, more consistent in implementation, and easier to support as the platform continued to grow.
Performance and scalability improvements
A major part of the modernization effort focused on eliminating performance bottlenecks that had accumulated over time across the platform. These issues were affecting both storefront responsiveness and the efficiency of internal platform processes, making it harder to support growth, new business requirements, and ongoing development.
Improvements
Together, these changes delivered measurable performance gains. In some cases, database query execution time dropped from around 5 seconds to under 90 milliseconds, making it up to 56 times faster.
Business-critical custom flows and integrations
Alongside core platform modernization, the work also included several business-critical improvements that made purchasing flows faster, reduced manual maintenance, and helped the platform support more complex commercial logic across regions.
A particularly urgent case emerged at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the client needed to accelerate the sale of ventilators. Delays were not an option, so the purchasing flow had to be adapted quickly.
In response, a custom solution was introduced to streamline the approval and purchase process for ventilators. Some of the standard validation steps were bypassed to enable faster transactions without compromising safety, showing the platform’s ability to support critical business needs even under extreme time pressure.
Other improvements supported ongoing commercial and operational needs:
Improvements
Performance and scalability improvements
As the platform supported multiple markets, regional expansion required more than simple storefront adjustments. Country rollout often involved changes across product data, checkout behavior, and communication logic, so regional enablement had to be handled as part of a broader cross-system setup rather than as a local configuration step.
One example was the Canada rollout, which introduced bilingual support for English and French on a shared codebase used by multiple ecommerce projects. To handle missing translations without overcomplicating the data model, a custom Solr indexing provider was implemented to fall back to the default language whenever a value was unavailable in the requested one. This allowed the platform to support multilingual requirements in a more efficient and maintainable way.
Regional logic also extended to product visibility and ordering rules. Selected products had to remain available only in specific countries or for certain customer types, while staying accessible for unrestricted users in other markets. To support this, country- and customer-specific restrictions were introduced to control product visibility, block unauthorized ordering, and handle restricted access without disrupting the experience in unrestricted regions.
Security and compliance improvements
The modernization effort also included targeted security improvements based on audit findings. Vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting exposure and actions available to anonymous users were addressed without requiring a full system overhaul. Access restrictions and safer navigation rules were introduced to prevent unauthorized behavior and improve platform compliance with minimal disruption to the existing solution.
Results
Conclusion
By modernizing the platform in place rather than rebuilding it from scratch, Expert Soft helped the client turn a legacy SAP Commerce solution into a more scalable and resilient foundation for growth. The platform became easier to evolve, better suited to country-specific expansion, and more capable of supporting ongoing business change without disrupting critical operations.
Technologies
SAP Commerce Cloud, Java, HTML, CSS, JS, React, JavaScript, TypeScript
