Kmart

The Challenge: Modernizing a legacy foundation to keep pace with digital demand

Known for offering a wide range of affordable home goods, clothing, toys and electronics, Kmart is one of Australia and New Zealand’s most trusted retailers. But despite its strong brand and loyal customer base, the company’s legacy on-premise technology had begun to constrain its digital ambitions.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and nationwide lockdowns drove shopping online, Kmart experienced unprecedented surges in digital traffic. Its legacy HCL platform — already showing signs of strain — struggled to keep up, resulting in instability and performance issues during peak traffic. 

Beyond the immediate pressure on infrastructure, the retailer’s technology stack was costly to maintain and difficult to evolve. Its rigidity slowed the rollout of new features and made it challenging to deliver the modern, loyalty-building experiences customers increasingly expect. As a result, Kmart faced missed revenue opportunities, rising operational costs and growing technical debt.

More than improving customer experiences, Kmart saw replatforming as essential to building a future-ready digital engine. The team set out to implement a flexible, modern commerce platform that would allow them to:

• Accelerate time-to-market for customer-centric initiatives that drive revenue.
• Reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) tied to hosting, maintenance and legacy systems.
• Increase agility and eliminate technical debt across the technology environment.
• Seamlessly manage traffic peaks without relying on costly, capacity-limited on-premise infrastructure.

For Kmart, migrating away from its legacy platform was a strategic move to future-proof its digital foundation and unlock faster, more scalable growth.

The solution: An enterprise commerce platform that enables continuous evolution

In 2020, Kmart set out to transform its digital operations by overhauling its legacy infrastructure and adopting commercetools as its enterprise eCommerce platform. The retailer chose an incremental migration approach to minimize disruption, gradually decommissioning legacy systems while introducing and continually enhancing the composable solution. This approach also gave Kmart’s internal teams the time and space to upskill in modern commerce technologies and cloud engineering.

The first step was to address Kmart’s most urgent need: Scaling online capacity during peak periods. Backed by commercetools’ cloud-native architecture, the retailer gained immediate elasticity across key commerce functions. The platform now automatically scales to meet unpredictable surges, from major shopping events like Black Friday to the viral popularity of Pokémon card releases, protecting revenue and ensuring high-performance customer experiences at all times. 

As replatforming progressed, Kmart began unlocking the speed and agility enabled by a composable architecture. The retailer introduced a best-of-breed CMS to accelerate content and product updates launches, empowering business teams to respond to trends, campaigns and seasonal activity with far greater autonomy. Customer experience improvements have followed, providing shoppers with flexible payment and order delivery options, pre-order on selected items, members-only pre-sales, and much more. 

As the technology enabler behind Kmart’s broader digital ambitions, commercetools provides a range of benefits that underpin these achievements:  

• Simple, reliable integration via well-documented APIs.
• High scalability across products, carts, customers and orders. 
• Region-specific flexibility for product, pricing and promotional data. 
• Support for iterative development, enabling rapid responses to customer needs without accumulating new technical debt. 

Building on this flexible technology, Kmart has been able to expand and manage product ranges across brands with localized offerings and adaptable business models, as well as enable deep personalization and establish the foundation for omnichannel experiences — all while reducing TCO. 

commercetools is the technology enabler behind our 25% online revenue growth and digital innovation. The flexible platform also enabled us to scale our digital commerce during peak times, respond to customer demand in real-time and continue to expand our marketplace and omnichannel capabilities to future-proof our business.

Idan Manor

Head of Engineering & Delivery, Kmart

The result: Significant digital revenue growth and fast marketplace integration

Kmart’s migration to commercetools has delivered a substantial business impact, unlocking sustained double-digit growth in online sales and orders. Online revenue now accounts for roughly 10% of total business revenue, while monthly order volume has nearly doubled, up over 80%. Digital engagement has also surged, supported by a broader and more compelling product offering. Key commercial gains include:

• Over 20% year-over-year growth in annual order volumes, with continued strong double-digit growth forecast for the upcoming year.
• Consistent double-digit revenue growth.
• Tens of millions of annual web sessions and a highly engaged mobile audience of well over a million monthly active app users.

With commercetools as its digital backbone, Kmart has strengthened its technical and operational performance. The cloud-native architecture provides enterprise-grade scalability and stability, ensuring peak resilience even during major surges. Technical improvements achieved:

• 99.99%+ availability with high performance during traffic events and product launches. 
• Significant reduction of deployment incidents or error rates. 
• A unified commerce tech stack powering both mobile and web channels. 
• Lower total cost of ownership for maintaining the commerce platform. 

These technical gains have elevated the customer experience and improved customer satisfaction. Kmart can now roll out enhancements quickly, responding to customer needs with the flexibility previously impossible on legacy systems.

Today, Kmart continues to future-proof its business thanks to commercetools’ flexible platform. In 2025, the retailer launched its Mirakl-powered marketplace, an initiative made possible by its composable foundation. The team delivered an MVP in just 4 months, introducing thousands of Target products (part of the Kmart Group) to the Kmart marketplace. The rollout introduced improved product discovery and marketplace badging, enabling sellers to offer multiple price points and supporting mixed-cart fulfillment paths for customers.

Looking ahead, Kmart plans to expand marketplace capabilities, enhance personalization through improved search and merchandising, enable cross-brand product sales and promotions across Kmart, Target, etc., and provide flexible fulfillment options, including click-and-collect, home delivery and express options. 

With commercetools as its technology enabler, Kmart now has the agility, scalability and confidence to accelerate digital innovation and drive long-term growth across Australia and New Zealand.