Arcvue — A Headless Storefront Built for Conversion at the Speed of the Edge
We rearchitected Arcvue's e-commerce experience as a fully decoupled headless storefront, delivering sub-second load times on every page, a fluid checkout flow, and a 3x lift in conversion rate within 60 days of launch.
When your store is slow, your revenue suffers
Arcvue is a premium lifestyle and homeware brand with a loyal customer base and a growing catalogue of over 1,400 SKUs. Their existing Shopify theme, heavily customised over years of incremental additions, had become a performance liability. Pages took anywhere from 4 to 8 seconds to load on mobile. The checkout was a three-page ordeal. Google's Core Web Vitals were in the red, dragging down organic search rankings.
They came to Cognate with two clear objectives: make the storefront as fast as possible and redesign the checkout to reduce drop-off. After an initial audit, we recommended a headless approach — keeping Shopify as the commerce backend and replacing the storefront layer entirely with a Next.js application deployed to the edge.
Ten weeks later, Arcvue's new storefront was live. Average page load time dropped to under a second. The Lighthouse performance score hit 98. Conversion rate tripled within the first 60 days — a result that exceeded the client's own projections by a significant margin.
A heavily patched Shopify theme was delivering 4–8 second load times on mobile, failing Core Web Vitals, and losing customers at every step of a three-page checkout. The brand's visual identity was strong; the technology was holding it back.
Rebuilding without disrupting commerce operations
The biggest constraint wasn't technical — it was operational. Arcvue's merchandising team lives in Shopify. They manage products, collections, discounts, and inventory there daily. Any solution that forced them to change their workflow or learn a new CMS would have been dead on arrival.
The headless architecture had to be completely transparent to the commerce team. They needed to keep using Shopify exactly as they always had, with all changes reflected on the new storefront within seconds. At the same time, the engineering solution needed to achieve near-perfect Lighthouse scores without sacrificing the rich, interactive product experience the brand demanded.
- Shopify must remain the single source of truth for all commerce data
- Merchandising team workflow must not change at all
- Zero downtime cutover — existing orders must not be disrupted
- Sub-1-second LCP on mobile on a median 4G connection
- Single-page checkout must support discount codes, gift cards, and Shopify Payments
- SEO continuity — no loss of organic rankings post-launch
- Shopify Storefront API as the data layer, fully decoupled from rendering
- Next.js App Router with Incremental Static Regeneration for product pages
- Deployed to Vercel Edge Network — serving from <50ms latency globally
- Custom single-page checkout built on Shopify's Checkout API
- Webhooks from Shopify trigger ISR revalidation within 5 seconds of any product change
- 301 redirect mapping and metadata parity to preserve all SEO equity
A next-generation storefront served from the edge
The architectural foundation is a clean separation of concerns: Shopify handles commerce logic (inventory, pricing, checkout, fulfilment) and the Next.js storefront handles presentation. They communicate exclusively through Shopify's Storefront API via GraphQL, giving us a stable, version-controlled contract between the two layers.
All product listing and detail pages are statically generated at build time and regenerated incrementally via webhook-triggered ISR. A product update in Shopify fires a webhook that calls our revalidation endpoint; the stale page is regenerated in the background and the new version is served from the edge cache within 5 seconds — all without a full site deploy.
We chose Incremental Static Regeneration over full SSR for product pages because Arcvue's catalogue changes infrequently relative to the volume of page views. Pre-rendering and serving from the edge eliminates the per-request compute cost entirely while webhook-triggered revalidation keeps content fresh. For the cart and checkout, where data is session-specific, we use client-side rendering against the Storefront API.
10 weeks from audit to live storefront
We structured the project so that a feature-complete staging environment was available for the client's review from week 6 onward, giving the merchandising team three weeks of parallel running before the production cutover.
Lean, proven, and built for performance
What actually changed for the business
Measurable outcomes within 60 days of launch
Working with Cognate felt like having a world-class engineering team embedded in our company. They understood what we were trying to achieve commercially, not just technically. The new storefront is night and day — our customers notice it, our numbers prove it, and our merchandising team didn't have to change a single thing about how they work. Fast, proactive, and they truly care about the outcome.