Headless Commerce at Black Friday Scale
ShopFlow's existing Shopify setup couldn't handle flash sales — they were losing $400K per hour during outages. We rebuilt their commerce platform as a cloud-native headless architecture that scaled from 500 to 25,000 concurrent users in under 60 seconds, with zero downtime across two consecutive Black Fridays.
Flash sales were bringing in 50× normal traffic in minutes. Shopify's shared infrastructure couldn't handle it. Cart abandonment during peak hit 78%. Their checkout flow had 7 steps and a 4.2 second load time. Payment failures were running at 12% during peak. Each Black Friday was a PR disaster.
We built a decoupled headless storefront on Next.js backed by a custom commerce engine. Auto-scaling Kubernetes handles traffic spikes. A Redis-backed inventory reservation system prevents overselling. The checkout was rebuilt as a 2-step flow with sub-second response times using optimistic UI and edge-cached product data.
KEDA-powered Kubernetes scales from 5 to 500 pods in under 60 seconds on traffic spike detection.
Redis-atomic cart reservations prevent overselling even at 25K concurrent checkouts.
Sub-50ms product search with typo tolerance, personalisation, and instant filters.
Cloudflare Workers serve product pages from 300+ edge locations with stale-while-revalidate.
Live GMV, conversion funnel, inventory alerts, and geographic sales heatmaps.
Marketing team controls all content, banners, and promotions with zero engineering involvement.
Load profiling, bottleneck analysis, headless architecture design, vendor selection.
Custom product/cart/order APIs, inventory service, Stripe integration, webhook system.
Next.js headless frontend, edge caching strategy, search integration, mobile optimisation.
Kubernetes auto-scaling, load testing to 100K RPS, Redis clustering, chaos engineering.
Merchant dashboard, headless CMS, inventory management, order fulfilment flows.
Staged rollout, Black Friday war-room, real-time monitoring, post-event optimisation.
We survived our biggest sales event ever without a single incident. The engineering team set up a war-room with us and monitored every metric in real time. Zero downtime. $8M in a single day. Absolutely incredible.
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