Schuhe.de replatformed on composable commerce. Faster releases, better search, and infrastructure that holds under peak load.

The Challenge

The existing Schuhe.de platform could not support the pace of change the business required. Releasing new features or launching seasonal campaigns meant slow, high-friction deployments. The architecture was not built for iteration. At the same time, the platform was underperforming where it mattered most to customers. Site speed was not meeting modern e-commerce benchmarks. The search experience did not reflect the breadth of the catalog or respond intelligently to the way customers actually browse footwear. Checkout flows introduced unnecessary friction at the moment closest to conversion. The underlying infrastructure was not built to absorb demand spikes without degradation. Black Friday, back-to-school campaigns, and new season launches all represent concentrated surges in traffic that a legacy system handles badly. The business needed infrastructure that would hold regardless of load. The strategic question was not whether to modernize - it was whether to do it incrementally or commit to a properly composable architecture that would support independent scaling and deployment of each platform component going forward.

The Approach

Gradion rebuilt Schuhe.de on a composable commerce foundation, selecting a technology stack capable of supporting the platform’s long-term growth rather than just resolving its immediate limitations. The frontend was built on Next.js and React, hosted on Netlify, delivering a fast and responsive customer-facing experience optimized for both performance and developer velocity. commercetools was chosen as the commerce backbone - providing the flexible, API-first infrastructure that makes it possible to change and extend individual components without rebuilding the entire platform. Product data management was centralized through Akeneo, giving the team a single authoritative source for catalog data across the platform. This eliminated the data inconsistency problems that typically emerge from fragmented product information systems at scale. Algolia was integrated to deliver AI-powered search - providing customers with faster, more accurate results across a wide catalog and reducing the friction between intent and discovery. Payment flexibility was addressed through dual integration with Adyen and Payever, giving customers reliable checkout options without adding operational complexity. The backend was designed around a microservices architecture using AWS Lambda, SNS, SQS, and EventBridge - enabling independent scaling of individual services and clean decoupling between platform components. Terraform was used to automate CI/CD workflows, giving the engineering team the deployment infrastructure needed to release features and campaigns quickly and reliably.