Online Store for Fashion Retailer

Seasonality, SKUs, and visual merchandising

The company faced typical fashion e-commerce challenges: strong seasonality with collection changes every 6–8 weeks, a catalogue of 12,000+ SKUs with complex variants (size, colour, material), and the need for product presentation on par with major fashion houses.

The merchandising strategy—curated looks, cross-selling by style world, and personalised recommendations—could not be implemented with the rigid category tree of the legacy shop. Marketing and buying needed freedom without blocking the IT queue every time.

Monolithic shop, slow campaigns, weak mobile performance

The legacy monolithic shop could not keep pace with collection velocity: adding new products took 3–5 business days, seasonal campaign landing pages required an external agency, and mobile load times exceeded four seconds—a conversion killer in fashion.

Stock was another pain point: store and online inventory were not synchronised, causing oversells and customer frustration. For a business with physical stores and a growing online share, that was operationally and reputationally costly.

Omnichannel expectations and payment diversity

Customers expected click-and-collect, consistent availability signals, and modern payment methods—while compliance (PCI-DSS, fraud detection) and ERP connectivity had to remain reliable in the background. The challenge was to unite these needs in an architecture that empowers marketing and keeps engineering maintainable.

Headless commerce with React and GraphQL

We built a headless commerce architecture that fully decouples the front end from the back end. The React front end talks to the back end via GraphQL and achieves sub-1.5s page loads—even on image-heavy collection pages.

A modular content system lets marketing create lookbooks, style-world pages, and campaign landings independently—within hours instead of days and without developer tickets.

Variants, recommendations, and real-time stock

Product configuration supports complex variant logic with live preview: shoppers see instantly how an item looks in another colour or size, including real-time availability. An AI-assisted recommendation engine analyses browsing and purchase history—from “complete the look” to “customers with your style also bought”.

Stock is synchronised in real time between store POS and the online shop, including click-and-collect. API integration to payment providers (Stripe, PayPal, Klarna, Apple Pay) is PCI-DSS compliant with tokenisation and automated fraud checks.

Engineering Made in Germany

We led concept, development, and launch from Leer (East Frisia): close alignment with the client’s leadership, marketing, and IT, iterative releases ahead of season starts, and load testing—typical for our B2B e-commerce engagements.

Conversion, mobile, and revenue

Conversion rate rose 35%; mobile conversions increased 52% as load time dropped from 4+ seconds to an average of 1.2 seconds. Average order value grew 28%, driven largely by AI cross-sell recommendations with a 12% click-through rate.

Online revenue grew 67% in the first year after relaunch. Time-to-market for new collections fell from 3–5 business days to under four hours as marketing can maintain products and campaigns independently.

Stock, click-and-collect, and returns

Oversells from stock mismatches were eliminated through real-time sync. Click-and-collect accounts for 18% of online orders and drives additional in-store revenue. Return rate fell by eight percentage points—thanks in part to richer product presentation and improved size guidance.

Reference for fashion e-commerce and headless architecture

The project shows how we deliver fashion e-commerce with custom software, performance focus, and omnichannel logic—alongside our E-Commerce & Fashion references and our online shop cost calculator.