The platform wasn't broken. It worked - just not in the way a growing business needs things to work. This is a story of leaving legacy behind
The real tension wasn't just about speed or cost, though both mattered. It was about what staying put would cost over time. A platform that slows down your ability to respond to customers, delays new features by months, and requires disproportionate technical overhead to maintain isn't a neutral choice - it's a quiet drag on competitiveness. And in B2B commerce, where relationships are long and expectations are rising, losing ground is rarely loud. It happens gradually, until one day the gap is too wide to close quickly.
When we got involved, the conversation started - as it often does - not with a solution, but with an honest look at the complexity. Four customer segments, each with different pricing logic, catalogue access, and purchasing behaviour. Punch-out integrations for enterprise procurement flows. A strong dependency on product data quality across a deep catalogue. These weren't edge cases to work around; they were the core of how Skydda's e-commerce had to function. The strategic insight was straightforward, even if the execution wasn't: Skydda didn't need a simpler platform - they needed a better-architected one.
The foundation is Adobe Commerce Cloud, chosen for its depth in B2B functionality and its ability to handle the kind of multi-segment, rules-heavy commerce Skydda operates. On top of that, we built a custom storefront in React - a headless approach that decouples the front-end experience from the platform's constraints, giving Skydda the flexibility to evolve their customer experience without waiting on backend release cycles. Integrated with their PIM system for product data governance, their ERP for pricing and order management, and their logistics infrastructure for fulfilment, the architecture is designed to hold up under real operational load. Punch-out support was built in from the start, not bolted on - because for enterprise customers running procurement through dedicated systems, that's not a feature, it's a prerequisite.
The architecture was designed around a clear business case: reduce the cost of running and evolving the platform, and give the team the ability to move faster. By moving off HCL Commerce onto Adobe Commerce Cloud with a decoupled React front-end, Skydda gains a significantly lower total cost of ownership - less custom maintenance overhead, a broader ecosystem of extensions, and a development environment where changes don't require months of lead time. Features that used to take a full sprint cycle to scope and implement can now be shipped in days. That's not a technical detail - it's what allows e-commerce to actually function as a strategic channel, rather than a system the business has learned to work around.
Every business like Skydda has its own version of this story - the moment where the infrastructure starts to hold back what the business is capable of. If that sounds familiar, we're happy to have a conversation about what it might look like to change that.
