Northwind Commerce
A replatformed storefront that survived Black Friday at eleven times normal traffic.
- Client
- Northwind Retail
- Industry
- Retail & e-commerce
- Discipline
- Web
- Duration
- 6 months, 2025
The problem
Northwind'sstorefronttook6.8secondstobecomeinteractiveonamid-rangephone,andthecheckoutdroppedroughlyathirdofthecustomerswhoreachedit.Thepreviousplatformrequiredadeveloperforeverymerchandisingchange.
The prior Black Friday had produced a 40-minute outage during the highest-traffic hour of the retail year.
What we did
We rebuilt the storefront on Next.js with per-route rendering strategy: static category pages at the edge, streamed personalisation, and a checkout that keeps working when a third-party script does not.
Payments were abstracted behind one interface with Paystack and PayPal behind it, made idempotent so a retried webhook cannot double-charge. Merchandising moved into a content model the retail team edits themselves, with preview before publish.
We load-tested at fifteen times the previous peak and rehearsed the failure modes before the season rather than during it.
Services applied
Technology
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Sanity
- Paystack
- PayPal
- Vercel
- Cloudflare
Gallery
Inside the build.
Results
What changed, measured after launch.
- Largest contentful paint on 4G
- 0.9sLargest contentful paint on 4G
- Checkout completion rate
- +0%Checkout completion rate
- Peak traffic served, zero downtime
- 0×Peak traffic served, zero downtime
- Developer hours per campaign launch
- 0Developer hours per campaign launch
“Black Friday was the first one in four years where nobody from my team was awake at 3am watching a dashboard.”
Lerato SitholeE-commerce Director, Northwind RetailRelated work
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