About the Client
Shoppers Stop is one of India’s leading omni-channel department store retailers, founded in 1991 and part of the K Raheja Corp group. The company works across 108 stores and 47 cities in India. It serves nearly 40 million customers across physical and digital channels. Shoppers Stop offers a curated portfolio of luxury, prestige, and premium brands across fashion, beauty, accessories, and home. The portfolio spans 1000+ brands across fashion, beauty, accessories, and lifestyle categories. It spans across two primary retail verticals: Shoppers Stop, a multi-category department store format, and SS Beauty, a dedicated premium beauty retail format.
Business Situation and Requirements
While Shoppers Stop’s physical retail sales remained strong, rising online demand exposed structural gaps in its website and mobile app.
As digital traffic increased, performance issues surfaced during peak events. Mobile experiences were inconsistent, and backend systems, including inventory and order management, were not built for true omnichannel scale.
Both customers and internal teams began feeling the strain, including:
Slower website and app performance during peak traffic.
Increased checkout abandonment due to friction in the buying journey.
Difficulty managing promotions seamlessly across online and offline channels.
Fragmented real-time inventory visibility.
Rising operational complexity as systems struggled to scale.
Solution
Shoppers Stop partnered with Unthinkable as its product engineering partner to execute a front-end revamp for web and mobile platforms within a 4-month window.
Unthinkable was responsible for:
- Full frontend rebuild using ReactJS
- Complete mobile application rebuild using Flutter
- Implementation of a new Strapi CMS instance
- UX optimization across high-intent user journeys
The team started by optimizing UX across high-intent user journeys to reduce friction and improve conversions, while enabling structural multi-brand alignment for Shoppers Stop and SS Beauty to ensure a cohesive yet flexible digital architecture. The following features and enhancements were implemented as part of this transformation.
Migrating the Frontend to ReactJS
The web experience was rebuilt on a modern ReactJS architecture to improve scalability and performance. Some of the key improvements we made were:
- Re-designed homepage with clearer content hierarchy
- Refined product listing pages for improved discovery
- Streamlined checkout workflow
- Optimized payment stage transitions
The frontend architecture was built to:
- Support fast First Contentful Paint (FCP)
- Keep Time to Interactive (TTI) within modern mobile commerce benchmarks
- Reduce Max Input Delay (MID) during cart and payment interactions
Key URLs achieved a PageSpeed Insights score of 99, showing measurable performance gains. The new architecture introduced cleaner state management and faster rendering, both of which are necessary during peak traffic periods.
Refactoring the Mobile using Flutter
To ensure cross-platform consistency and faster future iteration, the mobile application was rebuilt using Flutter. Some measurable business outcomes were:
- Unified design language across web and mobile
- Consistent interaction patterns
- Improved performance across devices
- Faster release cycles for new features
In high-intent e-commerce journeys, milliseconds impact conversion. The rebuilt mobile experience prioritised speed and clarity throughout the cart review and payment flows.
Migrating to Strapi CMS with ZDM Approach
A new Strapi CMS instance was created to support scalable content operations and centralized governance across both brands. Our migration outcomes were:
- Legacy CMS operated in parallel
- Content models were restructured
- Campaign banners, categories, and screens were rebuilt
- Multi-brand configurations were standardized
A Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM) approach ensured uninterrupted business operations. The new CMS enables:
- Dynamic campaign management
- Faster homepage and landing page updates
- Structured category configuration
- Centralized governance across two retail verticals
UX Optimization Across E-Commerce Flows
Important user journey workflows were refined to remove friction at high-intent moments:
- Simplified checkout process
- Improved cart-to-payment transitions
- Clearer information hierarchy during payment
- Enhanced visibility of First Citizen Club membership benefits
The emphasis was on conversion efficiency and usability, not just cosmetic refresh.
The Impact
The full web and mobile rebuild was delivered within four months and went live ahead of critical revenue periods for our client.
The new architecture delivered measurable improvements in speed, stability, and operational agility:
- PageSpeed Insights score of 99 on key revenue-driving URLs
- 100% uptime during peak traffic, handling over X million users without disruption
- Zero downtime during CMS migration, ensuring uninterrupted business continuity
Beyond technical metrics, the rebuild strengthened Shoppers Stop’s digital foundation in three critical ways:
- Improved checkout stability and faster load times reduced friction during high-intent purchase moments
- Enabled marketing teams to launch and manage campaigns faster across both brands
- Created a scalable architecture capable of supporting future traffic growth and omnichannel expansion
99 Key URL Score
on Google PageSpeed Insights
100% Uptime
during peak load times
Zero Downtime
During CMS migration
