Case study · Apex Retail Co.
Bespoke Headless E-Commerce & Edge API
Ultra-fast headless catalog delivering sub-second checkout transitions globally.
- Headless E-commerce
- Edge Architecture
- Performance Tuning
- Headline result
- 45% Increase in Mobile Conversion
- Median TTFB
- <120ms
- Lighthouse Performance
- 98
- Flash-sale Downtime
- 0 min
The Challenge
Apex Retail ran its storefront on a monolithic commerce platform that rendered every page on a single regional origin. Median time-to-first-byte sat at 3.8 seconds on mobile, and every flash promotion pushed the origin into timeouts. Cart abandonment on mobile was nearly double the desktop rate, and the marketing team had stopped scheduling time-boxed sales because the site could not survive them.
The brief was blunt: keep the existing inventory and order-management backend, but make the customer-facing experience fast everywhere and resilient under spikes.
The Solution
We decoupled presentation from the commerce engine and moved the storefront to the edge.
- Edge-rendered catalog. Category and product pages are server-rendered in Cloudflare Workers close to the shopper, with catalog data cached at the edge and purged by tag whenever inventory or pricing changes.
- Edge API layer. A thin Worker API aggregates the legacy inventory, pricing, and promotions endpoints into one response shaped for the storefront, cutting client round trips from seven to one.
- Islands-only interactivity. The cart drawer, variant picker, and checkout steps hydrate as small islands. Everything else ships as static HTML, which keeps the mobile JavaScript budget under 60 KB.
- Spike protection. Stale-while-revalidate caching and request coalescing mean a sale launch hits the origin once per cache key, not once per shopper.
Key Outcomes
- Lighthouse Score: 98 Performance / 100 Accessibility on mobile
- Median TTFB: under 120ms globally, down from 3.8s
- Conversion Uplift: 45% lift in completed mobile checkouts over the first full quarter
- Resilience: zero downtime across three flash promotions at 11× normal traffic