Eva.ua
More than 11,000 simultaneous users of the site during rush hour. Up to 1 order per second was placed during peak minutes during the Black Friday promotion.
Mar 2019 - currently
Eva.ua is the leading Ukrainian drogerie retail chain, with 1,100 offline stores, over 130,000 SKUs available online, and an impressive influx of 40,000 orders during Black Friday in 2024. Eva.ua began its eCommerce journey using a monolithic Magento system and later transitioned to a Headless PWA solution, incorporating rich custom features, marketplace capabilities, and omnichannel functionality. It’s a great example of when a business truly needs to go headless and how it can utilize its full capacity
13,000 orders
per day are placed on the web store
13 Miliion
web store visitors per month
40,000 orders
on Black Friday
130,000 SKUs
online
11,000 simultaneous users
on the website during rush hour
1 order per second
on Black Friday
About the project
Eva.ua began as a brick-and-mortar store in Dnipro city in 2002. By 2017, with 900 stores, the company decided to expand online. Initially, they launched a simple web store that averaged about five orders a day, primarily from their quality assurance team.
We started working on this project in 2019, when they approached us with a sluggish Magento-based store. The website had a page load time of 10 seconds and was prone to frequent downtime. We implemented significant improvements in performance, speed, and overall efficiency, which resulted in a doubling of sales.
What we accomplished in the first few years
- Conducted a performance and code audit
- Improved the Magento architecture
- Enhanced design and shipping functionality
- Updated cart design and functionality
- Customized the checkout process
- Managed static content
- Migrated to new hosting (DigitalOcean)
- Boosted performance
- Optimized search capabilities with Elasticsearch
- Scaled cache servers and distributed traffic across multiple servers
During peak hours, the site successfully handled more than 11,000 simultaneous users, and we recorded up to one order per second during rush hours, such as the Black Friday promotion. Remarkably, the system's load never exceeded 50% at peak times, demonstrating a double margin of throughput. Due to our advanced architecture and technology, the bandwidth can be further increased by 5-7 times within a few hours.
Although Eva.ua is a leader in its segment, it operates in a highly competitive market. To stand out from competitors, they need to provide an exceptional user experience. The web store must evolve dynamically, with new features being implemented and experiments conducted at a rapid pace. Such dynamic upgrades are challenging with a monolithic architecture. Therefore, it was decided to transition to a headless architecture, retaining Magento as the backend while replacing the frontend with a Progressive Web App (PWA).
Why Move to PWA with Headless Architecture?
Migrating to a Progressive Web App (PWA) is powered by headless architecture. It brings significant benefits for merchants seeking performance, flexibility, and scalability in their eCommerce operations.
- Lower Development, Support, and Maintenance Costs
Instead of managing both a web store and a native app, merchants can maintain a single PWA solution, which functions as an app while remaining a web-based platform.
A headless approach further simplifies maintenance by decoupling the frontend and backend, allowing for independent updates without disrupting core business processes.
- Faster Time to Market for New Features
Updating a PWA is much faster than rolling out changes to a traditional web store and multiple native apps (iOS and Android).
With headless architecture, frontend teams can iterate quickly without backend dependencies, enabling faster innovation.
- SEO & Visibility Benefits
Unlike native apps, PWAs are fully indexable by search engines, helping improve organic visibility.
Headless architecture enhances flexibility, allowing merchants to implement SEO best practices more efficiently by customizing URL structures, metadata, and content delivery without backend limitations.
- Performance & Scalability Enhancements
Native Magento frontend performance is often a challenge, requiring significant effort to optimize. PWAs leverage modern web technologies (e.g., Service Workers, lazy loading, and caching) to ensure fast page loads and seamless user experiences.
Headless architecture enables a lightweight, API-driven approach, reducing frontend complexity and improving speed, reliability, and scalability.
- Omnichannel & Future-Proof Flexibility
Headless commerce allows businesses to deliver a consistent shopping experience across multiple touchpoints—web, mobile, marketplaces, offline stores, IoT, and even emerging channels like voice commerce.
PWAs and headless solutions work device-agnostic, meaning merchants can easily expand to new markets and platforms without heavy re-development efforts.
- Improved Personalization & UX
With headless architecture, businesses can integrate advanced AI-driven personalization, A/B testing, and customer experience enhancements without affecting backend operations.
Faster load times, smooth transitions, and app-like experiences lead to higher engagement, reduced bounce rates, and increased conversions.
- Freedom to Choose a New Frontend
With a decoupled architecture, merchants are no longer locked into a single frontend technology.
Unlike traditional monolithic platforms, where changing the frontend requires extensive redevelopment, headless commerce enables businesses to adopt a new frontend solution without having to rebuild the entire system.
This flexibility allows merchants to experiment with different frontend frameworks (e.g., Vue.js, React, Next.js, or custom-built solutions) to find the best fit for their business needs.
By adopting PWA with a headless approach, merchants unlock a flexible, high-performance, and scalable eCommerce ecosystem—one that reduces operational complexities, improves customer experiences, and drives long-term growth.
How much time and resources Vue Storefront theme development take?
We started the development of a new PWA solution for eva.ua in April 2021. And it took a year in total. From the variety of available PWA options, together with eva.ua team, we chose Vue Storefront (now Alokai). The choice was based on feedback from the developers and the list of out-of-the-box features.
What challenges did we face during the development?
Vue Storefront was one of the best available PWA solutions back then. But it was not perfect and had some pitfalls. It changes dynamically and constantly improves, getting better with each new version.
Here are some issues that we've faced. Filters worked just from the config, they weren’t integrated with Magento and real filters. Default checkout was slightly different from the required. We had to implement our own integrations for shipping and payment methods, promo code functionality, checkout for logged-in customers, etc. Authorization and Customer Account also didn’t meet the requirements, so we rebuilt them from scratch.
We had to develop from scratch functionality for creating CMS landing pages from the Admin panel, Brand, Promotion, and Portal pages.
What integrations with third-party systems we’ve done
• Multisearch (search)
• Esputnik (push notifications, events, mailing)
• OWOX (tracking system, web analytics)
• GTM
• CPA Marketing - Admitad, SellAction
• Novapay, Wayforpay (payment)
• Nova Poshta, MeestExpress, UkrPoshta (shipping carriers)
• Authorization via internal eva.ua processing
What problems were solved by PWA?
• PWA added more flexibility due to cutting the monolith into smaller parts: frontend, API, ElasticSearch, backend (service structure)
• Deploy frontend without maintenance (independent frontend update)
• ElasticSearch allows easier, faster, and more flexible interaction with data, especially with attributes. For example, it became possible to display characteristics on the listing for products on hover
• Work in offline mode
• Faster and more flexible filter operation
• Higher performance of the entire frontend, navigating through pages without reloading
• In comparison with the old frontend, it became possible to bring the code to one structure and increase the reusability of the code (one component can be used on many pages, no need to duplicate). Make it more understandable.
• The development has become faster, the entry threshold is lower, the code is cleaner
What Else We’ve Done
- Built a Turnkey IT Team for eCommerce. We helped to build a dedicated team of developers, architects, and eCommerce specialists to support the project from strategy to execution, ensuring long-term scalability and success.
- Shopping Cart Customization & Advanced Checkout Functionality. Implemented custom shopping cart rules, mechanics, and enhancements to optimize the Checkout experience, boost conversions, and accommodate complex business logic.
- Custom Home Page Development. Developed a completely custom homepage, including a Magento module and frontend enhancements for unique branding, UX, and performance.
- SEO Optimization & Advanced Integrations. Optimized site structure, meta tags, redirects, and search indexing to enhance organic visibility and performance. Integrated SEO-focused functionality to improve ranking and traffic.
- Advanced Search Functionality. Enhanced site search with optimized algorithms, auto-suggestions, and filtering for faster, more relevant results.
- Stories Functionality (Social Media-Style Promotions). Developed an interactive stories feature that allows users to view promotions and news in an engaging format, increasing user engagement and content interaction.
- Custom Menu & Header. Designed and developed a custom navigation system to improve usability, accessibility, and user experience.
- Functionality & Integration with Redirects. Implemented custom redirect handling to improve user navigation, SEO, and URL structure consistency.
- Customization of Breadcrumbs Functionality. Improved breadcrumb navigation for better UX and SEO, ensuring logical user paths and clear site hierarchy.
- and many other...
Summary
A huge work on the project architecture and incredible scope of work on server side make this solution astonishing. As well as great work on all main pages like home, listings, shopping cart, checkout, checkout, search page, personal account.
As a result, eva.ua now has a flexible, future-proof frontend solution that is able to launch new features on the market faster to provide a better user experience and meet all customer expectations, constantly keep up with the client's demands
“Their openness and reasoned decisions impress us, as does their extensive experience in project development.”
Mark Miropolskyy
Deputy Director, Eva.ua
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