Nova Commerce is a direct-to-consumer retailer whose custom-built checkout buckled under load during flash sales and holiday traffic spikes — the exact moments that mattered most to revenue. We migrated to Shopify Plus with a custom Hydrogen storefront, rebuilding checkout specifically to hold up under peak load rather than just everyday traffic.
Nova Commerce's custom checkout was costing them conversions during their highest-traffic sales events.
Flash sales and holiday events were Nova Commerce's highest-revenue days of the year, and also the days their checkout was most likely to fail — the worst possible time for downtime.
Direct-to-consumer retail — revenue depends entirely on the storefront and checkout converting visitors during high-traffic sales moments.
DTC e-commerce, a category where flash sales and holiday events routinely produce far more traffic in short bursts than an average day.
A custom-built storefront and checkout, originally built in-house before Nova Commerce's traffic grew past what it was designed to handle.
Competing DTC brands already on Shopify Plus could promise customers a reliable checkout during flash sales, while Nova Commerce's own checkout was the thing most likely to fail at exactly those moments.
Analyzed session recordings and funnel drop-off data from the previous three sales events to find exactly where checkout broke down under load.
Load-tested the existing custom checkout to quantify how far past its breaking point actual peak traffic pushed it.
Mapped every Klaviyo integration point to make sure the migration wouldn't silently break automated email flows tied to checkout events.
Move to Shopify Plus rather than continue investing in the custom checkout.
Reasoning
Shopify Plus's checkout infrastructure is built and load-tested for exactly the kind of traffic spikes that broke the custom system.
Trade-off
Gave up some checkout customization the custom system allowed, in exchange for reliability at scale.
Build the storefront on Hydrogen rather than a standard Shopify theme.
Reasoning
Nova Commerce's brand experience needed more design control than a theme allowed, while still using Shopify's checkout underneath.
Trade-off
Added development time and complexity compared to a theme-based storefront.
Migrate URLs with a full redirect map rather than a fresh URL structure.
Reasoning
Preserving existing SEO rankings mattered more than adopting Shopify's default URL conventions.
Trade-off
Required maintaining a larger, more complex redirect configuration than a clean-slate approach.
Shopper
Arrives via web or mobile web, often during high-traffic flash sale windows.
What happened
The redirect map for thousands of legacy product URLs risked breaking existing SEO rankings if done incorrectly.
How we resolved it
Built and tested the full redirect map against the old sitemap before cutover, verifying every high-traffic URL redirected correctly.
What happened
Klaviyo flows triggered by checkout events needed remapping to Shopify's webhook payloads, which have a different shape than the old custom system's events.
How we resolved it
Built a translation layer that normalized Shopify's webhook events into the shape Klaviyo's existing flows expected, avoiding a full flow rebuild.
Approach
We migrated to Shopify Plus with a custom Hydrogen storefront, rebuilding checkout specifically for peak-load performance.
Outcome
Checkout completion improved measurably during the following peak sales season, with no downtime under load.
Checkout conversion
Page load time
Checkout uptime during peak event
“Checkout conversion improved 17% and we had zero downtime through our biggest sales event ever. They load-tested against our actual historical peak traffic before launch, which caught capacity issues we would never have found ourselves.”
Marcus Webb
VP Engineering, Nova Commerce
Expanding Hydrogen storefront personalization for returning customers
Client planA post-purchase upsell flow within the new checkout
Client planFurther Core Web Vitals tuning on category and product pages beyond checkout
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