Architecting a Scalable, Multi-Brand D2C eCommerce Solution

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Case Studies / Multi-Brand D2C Solution

Case Study: Architecting a Scalable, Multi-Brand D2C eCommerce Solution

An international consumer products organisation was seeking to replace its fragmented Magento eCommerce platform, which was limited to US-based sales and unable to support direct-to-consumer (D2C) shipments globally. The business required a modern, scalable solution capable of fulfilling orders from distribution centres in the UK, Germany, and Japan — while efficiently managing product delivery workflows for 31+ brands and 28 senior brand managers, coordinated through a two-person content team.

Challenges Identified

The existing platform was fragmented, incapable of global shipping, and offered no scalable solution for efficient multi-brand management.

A bottleneck existed in the content workflow, with approximately 360 product deliveries per year funnelled through a content team without the technical capacity to implement complex Magento changes or engaging page layouts.

The infrastructure lacked immutability, limiting the organisation’s ability to safely rebuild and scale the platform.

The existing kanban delivery process lacked visibility into bottlenecks and resource constraints, creating unreliable timelines and delivery risk.

Approach & Solutions

Design a Global D2C eCommerce Architecture: Architected a Magento solution operating from a single codebase, with brand-specific store levels managed through environment files on each domain. This setup dynamically filtered product collections by brand and applied the appropriate theme and assets, eliminating redundancy while maintaining flexibility.

Implemented Real-Time Global Shipping Options: Integrated a variable shipping plugin leveraging the organisation’s logistics accounts, dynamically offering customers the fastest, lowest-cost shipping options based on their location and proximity to the UK, Germany, or Japan warehouses.

Built Immutable, Scalable Infrastructure: Architected a modern, immutable AWS-based infrastructure capable of rapid teardown and rebuild without risking platform integrity. Centralised caches and databases were deployed on scalable AWS services, with read replicas added to isolate write bottlenecks and improve overall performance.

Introduced Agile Delivery and Process Transparency: Replaced the legacy kanban workflow with an Agile delivery model in Jira, implementing sprint cycles and configuring the tool to expose workflow bottlenecks and delivery risks. This empowered the two-person content team to commit to realistic delivery timelines.

Scaled Development Capacity with External Agency Support: Engaged a European development agency to augment the in-house team, integrating them into the Agile sprint cadence to accelerate Magento solution development.

The Outcome

Delivered a scalable, multi-brand, single-codebase Magento platform capable of global D2C order fulfilment.

Eliminated delivery bottlenecks by combining Agile workflows, increased delivery capacity, and improved infrastructure resilience.

Empowered the content team to reliably manage product launches and campaign timelines.

Established an infrastructure platform with scalable services and read replicas, ensuring high availability and performance under growing operational demand.

Key Learnings

A scalable, resilient eCommerce platform depends on simplifying operational complexity, integrating global logistics in real-time, and enforcing immutability at the infrastructure level. Process transparency and resource scalability are critical in high-volume, multi-brand environments to sustainably meet market demands.

What is Technical Debt?

Technical debt refers to the accumulated shortcuts, suboptimal solutions, or quick fixes in software development that save time in the short term but create additional work and complexity in the long term. It's like borrowing from the future: by choosing to implement a faster, less ideal solution now, you create "debt" that must be "paid back" later through refactoring, rewriting code, or fixing bugs. Over time, this debt builds up, making the system harder to maintain, scale, and improve. Technical debt is damaging because it slows down development velocity, increases the cost of future changes, and often leads to bugs or performance issues. As the codebase becomes more complex and fragmented, teams spend more time understanding, fixing, and working around earlier shortcuts rather than adding new features. This can hinder innovation, frustrate developers, and, if left unchecked, result in system instability or even project failure. Managing technical debt through disciplined practices and regular refactoring is crucial to maintaining long-term software health. .

Areas of Focus