E-COMMERCE PLATFORM TRANSFORMATION
"From external dependency to in-house capability—modernizing a global e-commerce platform while keeping 65+ countries operational."
The Situation
Sonic Equipment is the global specialist in professional hand tools, filled toolboxes and premium storage solutions. Operating across 65+ countries, they serve professional technicians in automotive, agriculture, trucking, maritime, aviation, and industrial sectors.
Their e-commerce platform worked, but it was holding them back.
They were dependent.
Every deployment required coordinating with an external partner. Changes that should take hours took weeks. Simple updates became expensive, time-consuming operations. The business wanted to move faster, but the platform architecture wouldn't let them.
The platform was fragmented.
Marketing and e-commerce lived on separate systems, separate domains. This created technical complexity and forced them to build shared features twice—once for marketing, once for shop.
Search wasn't keeping up.
With thousands of professional tools across multiple languages and markets, customers needed instant, intelligent search. The existing search was rigid and slow.
They wanted ownership.
Sonic's vision was clear: transition from external dependency to an in-house development team. They needed a partner who could build the new platform and build their team's capability to own it.
The constraint: 65 countries, thousands of professional customers, zero tolerance for downtime during business hours.
What We Did
We worked embedded at Sonic over 19 months, transforming the platform while building their internal capability.
1
Modernize in Place
We started by rebuilding the entire e-commerce experience with modern components. Each component was built in isolation, tested thoroughly, then integrated into the existing platform. This approach meant we could iterate quickly while keeping 65 countries operational.
We replaced the search with Algolia, giving customers instant results across their multilingual catalog. We rebuilt checkout flows, product pages, and every customer-facing feature—all while the platform stayed live.
The key decision: build everything to eventually move to Next.js, but don't couple to any specific platform. This let us deliver value immediately while preparing for the bigger architectural shift.
2
Move to Modern Infrastructure
With all components ready, we migrated to Next.js. This gave Sonic server-side rendering for instant page loads, edge caching for global performance, and most importantly: fast, independent deployment.
We unified their domain architecture, eliminating the technical complexity of separate marketing and e-commerce systems.
3
Building the Team
During the project, Sonic hired 2 frontend developers and 1 backend developer. We mentored them as we built—pair programming, code reviews, architectural decisions made together. By the end, they owned the entire platform.
We transitioned from interim team to advisors, then stepped back completely. Sonic went from external dependency to confident in-house capability.
What Changed
Sonic now controls their platform:
- Deploy in minutes, not weeks—no external partner coordination
- Search results appear instantly across global catalog
- Pages load near-instantly with server-side rendering
- Unified architecture—no more duplicate implementations
- In-house team ships features independently
When you serve professional technicians across 65 countries, your platform can't be a bottleneck. Now it's not.
Technical Notes
Transforming a platform serving 65 countries while maintaining 100% uptime required surgical precision. We rebuilt the experience piece by piece, with each component tested in isolation before going live.
Built every component to work in the existing platform today while being ready for Next.js tomorrow. This required careful abstraction: clean interfaces, no platform coupling, explicit boundaries between our code and existing infrastructure.
Migrated to Algolia for instant, typo-tolerant search across a multilingual catalog. Thousands of professional tools, multiple languages, instant results as customers type.
Every technical decision considered both immediate delivery (working in current platform) and future state (Next.js). This influenced component design, data patterns, and infrastructure choices throughout.
- Next.js: Server-side rendering, edge caching, modern React
- Algolia: Instant search, multilingual, typo-tolerant
- TypeScript: Type safety across codebase
- Cloudflare: Unified domain architecture
- Vercel: Fast deployment, global edge network