The client approached us to take over an ongoing e-commerce project built on a headless, modular architecture.
For backend product and order management
For frontend and landing pages
For whole content management
Despite over 2,500 development hours already invested by a previous agency, the system was far from ready for everyday business operations. The platform suffered from failed transactions, broken product data, malfunctioning integrations, and lacked even basic deployment and documentation processes.
With customers impacted and business at risk, the client needed immediate technical stabilization, fast. They needed a partner who could stabilize the system, restore control over environments, and give the platform a reliable foundation for future growth.
When we stepped in, the situation was urgent.
The previous agency put in over 2,500 development hours a year, and yet the store was struggling with serious issues.
.
Product feeds, vouchers, shipping methods
500 errors on Product Pages
For every product variants
Missing configuration files, no working local or staging environment
In forms - every field validated incorrectly
Between PCMarket ERP and Medusa database
For production changes
*Server-Side Rendering on the frontend
Was broken with multiple uploads
The frontend and backend were misaligned, the infrastructure was chaotic, and basic maintenance tasks were risky.
The store was barely holding together, with bugs affecting real customer experiences.
We approached the project systematically, treating it as a full rescue operation.
First – takeover and stabilization
Within the first 50 hours, our development and DevOps team:
All of this was done without any initial project documentation, no .env files, no README, and no working staging setup – purely based on code inspection and recovery best practices.
This allowed us to stabilize the most urgent issues without putting the live store at risk.
Second – fixing technical problems layer by layer
We performed a complete technical audit across the backend, frontend, and infrastructure layers.
The Medusa.js backend, although promising, had been left in a fragile state:
Data returned by PCMarket ERP was often inconsistent, but the backend lacked proper validation and transformation logic. We created a reliable adapter that transformed incoming ERP data into clean Medusa product models.
Sensitive user data was logged to production consoles, posing a security threat. We reworked the logging system to exclude personal data and cleaned up insecure endpoints.
The ERP-to-Medusa sync process failed during full runs due to insufficient server resources. We diagnosed and resolved the issue by expanding the server’s RAM allocation on Digital Ocean, enabling full synchronization within around 4 hours.
We refactored key integrations (like Autopay and Apaczka) to avoid hard-coded assumptions, ensuring modularity and easier future upgrades.
Some critical changes were made directly on the production server, not pushed to Git. We audited and reconciled those differences to ensure version control integrity.
The Next.js 14-based frontend also faced critical reliability and UX issues:
Forms validated all fields at once, regardless of user interaction, making forms unusable. We refactored the logic using Formik and Yup, ensuring fields are validated independently and clearly.
Although the app migrated to Next.js 14, it was incomplete. Critical hydration errors and broken middleware were causing performance and SEO issues. We stabilized SSR (Server-Side Rendering) and fully adapted the app to the App Router model.
The product gallery relied on a faulty ResizeObserver implementation, causing layout glitches and visual jumps. We reworked the gallery rendering to properly handle viewport and image size recalculations.
The original store assumed that every product variant must have all attributes, leading to errors during checkout. We updated the logic to allow flexible variant management.
The Instagram product feed and Google Shopping product feeds were non-functional, blocking external marketing integrations. We fixed serialization and feed formatting to restore these channels.
The CMS used for managing marketing content – Strapi – needed updates and cleanup:
The previous editor setup caused formatting inconsistencies. We implemented a customized version of CKEditor 5, restricting available formatting options to match branding guidelines and ensuring clean, valid HTML output.
Draft/publish logic was inconsistent. We improved workflows so that content editors could reliably manage live and upcoming updates without risking unintentional overwrites.
We reorganized Strapi's data models to better support dynamic SEO metadata, CTA blocks, and reusable components across the site.
The system’s environment management was in a critical state when we took over:
Deployment to production required manual server intervention every time. We introduced basic CI/CD pipelines for backend and frontend to automate builds, tests, and safe releases.
Vercel had dozens of unnecessary, unused, and sometimes duplicated environment variables. We cleaned them up, standardized naming, and ensured clear separation between staging and production environments.
The project lacked .env files for both staging and production. We rebuilt the configurations from scratch, based on analyzing deployed apps.
Code branches for staging and production had drifted apart dangerously. We manually audited and synchronized them to avoid regression risks.
All of this was done without any initial project documentation, no .env files, no README, and no working staging setup – purely based on code inspection and recovery best practices.
This allowed us to stabilize the most urgent issues without putting the live store at risk.
We used a Kanban project management approach, with weekly updates and close collaboration with the NFC Wear team to ensure fast delivery and clear communication.
Spent by the previous agency (before takeover)
for full project takeover and first fixes
Spent to stabilize the platform
Tasks completed during rescue and optimization
Products synchronized from external ERP (PCMarket)
After a few months of intensive work, the project landscape changed completely:
ready for ongoing operations
synchronized with production
making deployments faster and safer
affecting customer experience and revenue
enabling easier maintenance and future development
Most importantly, the client now has full control over their platform, with significantly reduced operational risk compared to the chaotic state we inherited.
Comment from the expert:
In the same amount of time (~300 hours), the client could have replatformed entirely to a clean Shopware 6 setup, with a fully working store and significantly more modern features. However, stabilizing the current system was necessary first due to operational risks.
If you’re looking for a partner who can stabilize, optimize, and grow your system – let’s discuss your needs.
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