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40%

Faster Page Loads

Case study · Beauty & Cosmetics

Minimal-Downtime Magento Migration for Premium Beauty Brand

Full platform migration from end-of-life Magento 1.9 to a cloud-native Magento 2 architecture with AI-powered recommendations.

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Project details

Client
Premium beauty brand (100K+ SKU catalog)
Industry
Beauty & Cosmetics
Timeline
14 weeks
Platforms
Magento 1.9 → Magento 2

The challenge

What we walked into.

The brand had been running on Magento 1.9 for years -- a platform well past its end-of-life. Security patches had stopped arriving, leaving the storefront exposed to known vulnerabilities. For a business handling payment data across 100,000+ SKUs, this was an existential risk.

Checkout abandonment had climbed to 78%, driven by a clunky five-step checkout flow that hemorrhaged mobile customers. Page load times were punishing, especially on product listing pages where the catalog's size overwhelmed the aging infrastructure. Every day on the old platform meant lost revenue and compounding technical debt.

A platform swap alone would not fix this. The brand needed a modern, scalable foundation that could support their growth trajectory while immediately improving conversion metrics.

What we built

The engineering decisions.

Cloud-Native Architecture

We migrated the entire storefront to Magento 2 running on AWS -- EC2 instances behind CloudFront CDN, RDS for database, and ElastiCache (Redis) for session and full-page caching. The architecture was designed to auto-scale during traffic spikes like product launches and seasonal sales events.

Checkout Reimagined

The original five-step checkout was rebuilt from scratch into a tightened two-step flow. Guest checkout was prioritized, address auto-complete was integrated, and payment processing was optimized for speed. Every interaction was tested against PCI DSS controls to keep the audit-ready posture intact without sacrificing user experience.

AI-Powered Recommendations

We implemented an AI recommendation engine trained on the brand's purchase history and browsing patterns. Product recommendations were surfaced across PDPs, the cart, and post-purchase emails -- creating a personalization layer that the old platform simply couldn't support.

Minimal-Downtime Migration

The cutover strategy used blue-green deployment. The new environment was built and validated in parallel, with a custom inventory sync bridge keeping both systems in lockstep. When the switch happened, customers experienced zero interruption -- no maintenance windows, no lost orders, no data discrepancies.

The results

Measured outcomes.

40%

Faster page loads

78% → 52%

Checkout abandonment

12%

Revenue from AI recommendations

  • 40% faster page loads across all devices, with sub-2-second LCP on product pages
  • Checkout abandonment dropped from 78% to 52%, recovering significant lost revenue
  • Cloud-native architecture with auto-scaling handles 10x traffic during peak events
  • PCI DSS-aligned controls restored end-to-end — closing the security exposure left behind by the end-of-life platform and handing off audit-ready to the client's QSA
  • AI-powered product recommendations now drive 12% of total revenue

The engineering behind this

Beauty CommerceThe vertical this work sits in.Magento / Adobe CommerceThe platform behind the migration.Platform MigrationHow we run a replatform safely.

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