MOD Lighting: a phased Shopify Plus headless migration

Shopify Plus | Headless | Lighting

From optimisation to a new storefront architecture

Our relationship with MOD Lighting began with conversion rate optimisation. The earlier collaboration reported 314% sales growth as a relative increase; that figure belongs to the CRO phase, rather than being presented as the result of the later headless migration.

The next assignment was a Shopify Plus replatforming project shaped around faster feature delivery, localized experiences and richer product presentation. We separated the custom storefront from the commerce backend while retaining Shopify’s product and trading capabilities.

Headless migration scope

Four-phase migration

Planned, built, tested and gradually deployed the headless storefront, with team training included in the rollout.

Localized commerce experience

Connected market-specific content, pricing and language requirements to the Shopify Plus storefront.

Reusable product experiences

Built modular storefront components and richer product presentation so the team could develop the experience without rebuilding each page from scratch.

Four phases from planning to rollout

The migration followed four delivery phases, with validation before wider rollout:

Planning: assess the existing systems, storefront requirements and delivery scope.
Development: build the custom storefront and connect the CMS and commerce APIs.
Testing: resolve issues and check the buying journey, integrations and performance.
Deployment: introduce the platform gradually and train the team that would operate it.

A platform the team could keep developing

The architecture gave MOD Lighting separate control over product presentation and commerce operations. Reusable components supported new pages and features, while localized content helped the storefront serve different markets.

The project also illustrates the tradeoff behind headless Shopify development: additional interface flexibility comes with responsibility for integrations, release quality and ongoing engineering.

The Reality Gap: When Flat Images Aren't Enough

Premium lighting shoppers need to understand a fixture’s scale, finish and appearance in a room. We developed richer product views for MOD Lighting so those questions could be explored within the shopping experience.

The 3D product experience article explains that work in more detail. Our separate MOD Smart engineering article covers the connected-device application.

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