The Vitamin Shoppe’s customers expect seamless experiences across every touchpoint — anytime, anywhere. However, delivering that consistency proved difficult with a legacy eCommerce platform, which had long development and deployment cycles that slowed the speed to market.
The limited scalability of large sales events due to outdated hosting infrastructure has become increasingly problematic over time. What was once sporadic downtime became a regular issue, severely affecting the customer experience. On the infrastructure side, this also meant a costly and time-consuming exercise of provisioning new hardware while being on the legacy eCommerce platform. Furthermore, Black Friday-like events meant moments of stress for the development team, as they needed to be in an all-hands-on-deck mode to prevent downtime.
Beyond seasonal sales events, developers faced challenges in creating and maintaining services to meet customer expectations. The monolithic nature of the retailer’s eCommerce solution made it difficult to focus on innovation, with technical experts primarily focused on firefighting — fixing bugs and ensuring the system was always up and running. “Deployments were complex and slow, and the more changes the team made, the more defects they experienced,” said Uman Chan, Senior Director of Digital Technology at The Vitamin Shoppe. “It was a vicious cycle.”
With mounting pressure to deliver on business requirements faster — and to overcome these challenges — The Vitamin Shoppe set out to digitally transform its technology stack, moving from monolithic to a composable commerce platform.
The Vitamin Shoppe sought to modernize its digital commerce with a flexible, future-proof foundation that could scale in line with evolving customer expectations. “When we started out, we weren’t necessarily set on a composable commerce journey,” said Uman. “But we needed a flexible and future-proof enterprise eCommerce platform — and a partner who could grow with us.”
As the business continued to evolve, it became clear that exchanging one legacy platform for another wouldn’t achieve the flexibility required to keep up with the demands of the business. The team quickly recognized that a best-of-breed approach would allow them to gradually replace monolithic systems with specialized tools, building agility and resilience into every project while incrementally delivering business ROI. The catalyst for the decision on composable came from the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which required the company to develop a wide range of omnichannel solutions, including curbside pickup and mixed carts, at a fast pace.
The decision made, The Vitamin Shoppe initiated a phased migration process by gradually decoupling the legacy platform and accelerating development for specific site functions in response to short-term business needs with high ROI impact. Some of these initiatives included Search/PLPs (product listing pages), the redesign of PDPs (product description pages), the introduction of “favorites” option and the integration of a CMS system.
“As we worked on delivering these high-ROI projects, we offloaded traffic from the monolith and into the scalable MACH® ecosystem,” said Uman. Subsequent rollouts extended to cart, checkout and customer profiles — all powered by commercetools — ensuring that new and existing systems worked together seamlessly to maintain a consistent customer experience.
The Vitamin Shoppe opted for a phased migration approach that prioritized tangible business value. With an ROI-driven strategy, the retailer built microservices in the cloud for different sections of the eCommerce site. “Composability is perfect because it allows us to do things gradually,” said Uman. “We’re able to continuously deliver value for the business and our customers. Our migration process was 100% driven from a business value standpoint.”
The phased rollout also enabled The Vitamin Shoppe to employ advanced deployment strategies, such as dark launches, feature toggles and geolocation-based dials to test and release features safely. Robust rollback mechanisms further ensured reliability during the migration process.
Despite initially having limited experience with composable commerce, the development team rapidly upskilled, relying on vendor partnerships and experimentation to design a scalable architecture.
Our customers expect seamless experiences across different touchpoints, wherever and whenever they want to be. You can’t be seamless for your customers unless you have a seamless backend. With commercetools, we’re able to continuously deliver value through a composable platform that gives us the flexibility to innovate faster and the scalability to navigate sales events without a hitch.
Senior Director of Digital Technology, The Vitamin Shoppe
The Vitamin Shoppe’s shift to a composable architecture has delivered measurable business impact and a mindset shift across the organization.
The platform’s performance has enabled the company to eliminate downtime, as it’s now able to handle peak holiday traffic with seamless autoscaling. “We went live fully just before Black Friday last year, and it was the first time during the holiday season that we were all at home, relaxing and spending time with a family,” said Uman. The performance improvements in individual operations, particularly in cart and checkout, have also contributed to the company’s growth.
Thanks to more efficient CI/CD practices, deployment cycles accelerated from bi-weekly releases to multiple updates per week, boosting ROI-driven innovation. The ability to deploy individual services reduced regression testing time from 2–3 days to just a few hours, with QA automation continuing to streamline the process. This freed up engineering capacity to focus on innovation rather than maintenance, enabling developers to create solutions that directly influence business results.
In addition, the modular nature of the new architecture enables the team to swap or upgrade third-party integrations with ease, keeping the platform agile, adaptable and disruption-free. Even during major sales events, the system now runs smoothly.
Beyond technology, the transformation sparked a profound cultural shift. Developers have become true engineers, acquiring new skills in cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and AWS, while also assuming full ownership of the stack — from infrastructure to DevOps and platform engineering. Moreover, business users, such as marketers, are empowered to refresh site content independently from the technical team. They can complete their tasks more quickly and efficiently.
This autonomy fostered greater job satisfaction, accountability and a mindset focused on continuous improvement. “Investments in upskilling for both an implementation and maintenance standpoint have been a pillar of our strategy,” explained Uman. “Developers are spending time innovating and solving complex technical and architectural issues, rather than chasing down production defects and keeping the lights on.”
By taking an ROI-driven approach for each project, The Vitamin Shoppe not only modernized on a limited budget but also established a scalable foundation for the future. Looking ahead, the retailer is focused on unified commerce experiences, one-to-one personalization and seamless interactions across every channel on the horizon.
