Custom E-Commerce Platform with AI Product Recommendations

The problem

The brand had outgrown its Shopify theme: page speed suffered from too many third-party apps, product recommendations were generic "customers also bought" widgets that ignored real browsing behavior, and the team couldn't customize checkout or promotions without fighting the platform's limits.

What we built

• Built a fully custom storefront in Next.js with server-side rendering for product and category pages, cutting reliance on client-side JavaScript that was slowing the old theme down.
• Designed a recommendation engine that scores products by a mix of browsing session behavior, purchase history, and inventory freshness, rather than static bestseller lists.
• Integrated Stripe directly for checkout with saved payment methods and one-click reorder, removing several third-party checkout apps in the process.
• Built a lightweight internal dashboard for the merchandising team to override recommendations and feature specific products during promotions, without needing an engineer.

The result

Page load times dropped by roughly two-thirds on mobile, where most of the brand's traffic comes from. Cart-to-purchase conversion improved by 22%, and average order value rose 14% as the recommendation engine started surfacing genuinely relevant add-ons instead of generic bestsellers.