The existing platform
Davidoff already had an e-commerce platform designed around the brand’s visual standards and attention to detail. We joined the project to extend it for further market rollouts.
The next phase covered the United States, Switzerland and Germany. The platform needed regional languages, pricing and content, better performance, and search that could distinguish closely related products in the catalogue.
Davidoff selected Outmatic based on our experience building and extending e-commerce platforms in the luxury sector. Maintaining design quality and brand consistency was part of the brief.
Work on a live storefront
The platform was already serving customers. We had to understand the inherited codebase and architecture, address its constraints and deliver changes while keeping the storefront stable.
The scope included performance improvements; support for different languages, price lists and tax rules; additional payment methods and updated age-verification gateways; and personalised semantic search. These changes had to fit the existing shopping experience and brand design.
Implementation
We worked in short Agile iterations with regular checkpoints shared directly with the Davidoff team.
We first reviewed the platform to decide what to retain, refactor or extend. The implementation then proceeded through several parallel workstreams.
Performance. We analysed bottlenecks in the headless front end, rendering strategy and edge delivery on Vercel, then made targeted changes to improve page loading.
Regional configuration. We strengthened the architecture around BigCommerce, Builder.io and Vercel. The shared platform supports the language, catalogue, pricing and content needed in the United States, Switzerland and Germany, reducing repeated work for each market.
Checkout. We added payment methods suited to each market and updated the age-verification gateways for the regulatory requirements associated with selling tobacco products in different jurisdictions.
Personalised semantic search. We introduced a search layer that interprets user intent and adapts results to the user’s context. This helps customers distinguish products with similar descriptions and categories when browsing the catalogue.
A Delivery Manager, four developers and one QA engineer worked alongside Davidoff for roughly six months. The team maintained the live platform while delivering the changes.
Results
- +45% average page load speed, following the front-end and edge-delivery work.
- –60% time spent managing content, through more consistent use of Builder.io across markets.
- A multilingual storefront with payment methods and checkout requirements configured for each market.
- Semantic search that helps customers find relevant products within a closely related catalogue.
- A shared platform prepared for additional market rollouts, with centralised maintenance.