Hancocks, the UK’s leading B2B confectionery wholesaler, managed over 3,000 products across 14 stores but relied on an outdated Adobe Commerce platform. Performance limitations, security vulnerabilities, and rigid content workflows hindered operational efficiency and customer experience. Net Solutions re-engineered a headless, composable architecture with React and Next JS on the Front end, Adobe Commerce at the backend and Contentful for the CMS. This transformation reduced maintenance overhead, improved user engagement, and resulted in measurable business growth, including improved order values and increased traffic.
Concurrent users supported without downtime, up from 100 before the overhaul
Average order value increased after checkout and order-flow improvements
Faster content updates after the move to Contentful
Faster page loads after the front-end rebuild
Most traditional B2B companies view e-commerce updates as basic front-end design projects. That is a structural mistake. For Hancocks, deep architectural flaws inside the core application layer were actively undermining their digital competitiveness.
Our initial technical evaluation highlighted several critical pain points across the system:
High traffic volume during peak sales hours caused recurring database deadlocks. Because the platform’s core components were tightly coupled, these database failures triggered system-wide crashes, leading to severe transaction losses and customer dissatisfaction.
The website suffered from lengthy page load times that routinely exceeded 6 seconds. This slow responsiveness created a high bounce rate and directly degraded user conversion numbers.
The system was weighed down by over 100 active plugins, many of which were outdated or non-essential. This plugin overload, combined with more than 100 poorly scheduled cron jobs running simultaneously, created a massive maintenance burden and drained system resources.
Content management was deeply embedded within the core commerce engine, meaning marketing updates and delivery shared the same infrastructure. Marketing teams were forced to access the core Magento admin to make basic changes, slowing down promotional updates from hours to days and creating ongoing backend performance lags.
The platform’s concurrent user capacity was heavily restricted, stalling when web traffic scaled past 100 simultaneous shoppers. Furthermore, the native search function offered limited filtering logic, returning broad and irrelevant results that hindered product discovery and neutralized personalization efforts.
We proposed a fundamental shift away from monolithic systems toward a composable, headless architecture. We do not guess what an enterprise infrastructure requires; we map out exact component boundaries to isolate failures and secure resource allocation.
Our team designed a systematic, four-step implementation roadmap to execute the migration without interrupting Hancocks’ continuous wholesale business operations:
The platform modernization successfully transformed Hancocks’ digital storefront into a highly stable, high-performance revenue engine. By decoupling the architecture and streamlining operational workflows, we achieved massive improvements in site speed, user concurrency, and average order value.
Hancocks’ legacy system was burdened with excessive CRON jobs and unnecessary plug-ins, creating performance bottlenecks. Net Solutions decoupled frontend and backend operations by transitioning to a composable, headless architecture, improving scalability and system stability. This change allowed Hancocks to handle 300+ concurrent users, up from just 100, while maintaining a 99% uptime ensuring platform stability and availability.
The modular architecture facilitated seamless integrations with specialized solutions like Algonomy for AI-driven product recommendations. Additionally, OpenSearch was implemented to enhance search performance and streamline order processing. This approach reduced security risks and enabled faster adaptation to market demands.
Previously, Hancocks’ content management was slow and inefficient due to a rigid CMS. By adopting Contentful, they streamlined content creation and introduced modular content blocks for greater flexibility. This reduced developer dependency and allowed marketing teams to manage campaigns more efficiently, yielding 80% faster content updates.
With a more structured CMS, Hancocks improved control over metadata, headings, and tags, strengthening SEO performance. This allowed for better search visibility and easier multi-channel content management, ensuring long-term digital agility.
Performance issues, including slow load times caused by outdated plugins and server constraints, were addressed by upgrading to Adobe Commerce 2.4.5 and rebuilding the front end with Next JS. These changes resulted in significantly improved site performance yielding 50% faster page loads and boosting engagement, with average hourly concurrent users increasing by 60%.
By integrating PayPal with Braintree and optimizing order workflows for both online delivery and click-and-collect, Hancocks enhanced the checkout experience. This improvement led to a smoother customer journey and a 2.79% increase in average order value (AOV).
By modernizing Hancocks’ eCommerce infrastructure, Net Solutions delivered a scalable, high-performance platform. The adoption of a composable architecture and Contentful CMS empowered Hancocks to adapt rapidly to market changes, optimize content workflows, and enhance customer engagement. This transformation highlights Net Solutions’ expertise in delivering future-ready digital solutions for mid-sized enterprises.
We align technology execution with actual business outcomes. Our team combines deep technical knowledge with structured engineering standards to turn complex, high-risk migrations into highly predictable system deployments. We know that an upgraded storefront is useless if it remains tethered to a brittle backend framework. By setting clean component boundaries and treating content, commerce, and search as independent product layers, we build digital infrastructure designed for continuous business innovation. If you need an enterprise partner capable of breaking down your monolithic debt without disrupting your active transaction pipeline, let’s connect.
Headless Adobe Commerce (2.4.5)
API-driven Contentful CMS
Algonomy for product recommendations
React JS / Next JS for the front end
OpenSearch 1.2, Redis 7.0
Distributed AWS architecture
PayPal with Braintree, Credit/Debit Card, On Account, BACS
GDPR compliance with OneTrust and Google Analytics 4
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