Modernizing a German E-Commerce with a MACH Architecture

Commercetools was selected as the commerce engine of record — a cloud-native, API-first platform providing a composable set of capabilities over well-defined REST and GraphQL APIs.

• Full implementation: product, category, inventory, pricing, discount, cart, and order APIs
• Multi-store configuration for separate storefront deployments
• Custom rounding-mode configuration for German VAT compliance
• GraphQL-powered product queries for high-performance, selective data fetching
• Webhook architecture for real-time event propagation across services

The customer-facing storefront was built as a fully headless React application using Next.js, integrated with Frontastic's Commerce Frontend Engine for page and component management.

• Next.js (React, TypeScript) with server-side rendering and static generation for optimal SEO
• Tailwind CSS design system for consistent, responsive UI across all devices
• Algolia integrated for fast, relevance-ranked product search and category filtering
• Contentful as the primary CMS for editorial content, banners, and campaign pages
• Custom SEO architecture: robots.txt per locale, sitemap generation, structured URL slug handling

We integrated four payment gateways to maximise coverage across customer payment preferences and geographies — each built as an isolated backend extension module.

• Adyen — primary gateway for card payments, supporting 3DS2, tokenisation, and recurring billing
• PayPal — wallet-based checkout with express checkout flow
• Amazon Pay — one-click checkout leveraging shoppers' existing Amazon credentials
• Unzer (Heidelpay) — local German payment methods: invoice, instalment, and direct debit

We built bidirectional integrations with both enterprise systems to create a single source of truth across sales, service, and fulfilment.

• Customer account data synchronised between Commercetools and Salesforce
• Order events pushed to Salesforce for customer service and campaign tracking
• Customer segmentation and loyalty data surfaced back to the storefront

• Real-time inventory levels consumed from D365 and propagated to Commercetools
• Order data pushed to D365 for finance, fulfilment, and reporting
• Product master data mastered in D365 and synchronised to Commercetools via automated pipelines

We designed and implemented the complete operational workflow from inventory in the warehouse to the customer's doorstep.

• Warehouse inventory managed in D365, surfaced to the storefront in near-real time
• Order placed on genius.tv → captured in Commercetools → propagated to D365 for pick/pack/ship
• DHL address autocomplete integrated at checkout to reduce delivery errors and cart abandonment
• Shipping confirmation events fed back to Commercetools for order status updates
• Transactional email notifications via SMTP and SendGrid for order and account events

The entire platform runs on Microsoft Azure, with Azure DevOps managing the CI/CD lifecycle across all environments.

• Azure DevOps pipelines for automated build, test, and deployment
• Azure Functions as serverless microservices for event-driven integrations
• Netlify as the global CDN and hosting layer for edge-optimised delivery
• Automated test suites (Jest unit + Playwright end-to-end) integrated into the CI pipeline

Genius's TV shopping model creates sudden, unpredictable traffic spikes when products air. We engineered the platform for burst resilience.

• Multi-tiered server-side cache (LRU + TTL) across five independent cache maps
• Product GraphQL queries cached for up to 2 hours; PLP data cached for 1 hour with tag-based invalidation
• Cache controller endpoints for fine-grained invalidation by SKU, category, tag, or locale
• Page payload reduction targeting Core Web Vitals and Time to First Byte

• Talon.One promotions engine for rule-based discounts, voucher codes, and loyalty campaigns
• Dynamic Yield integrated for personalised product recommendations and A/B testing
• Nosto and Bloomreach integrations for content and product personalisation across storefronts
• Amplience and Contentstack available as additional CMS sources in the onlinestore channel