cannabis
Featured Project
Imperial Bud
31,000-Line Platform Rebuild: WooCommerce to Headless Commerce
A ground-up e-commerce rebuild replacing a crashing WooCommerce store with a custom Medusa.js v2 platform — 334 products, 5 locations, loyalty rewards, ID verification, live chat, and same-day delivery across Ontario.
The Challenge
Imperial Bud was running on a bloated WordPress + WooCommerce stack with 8+ plugins layered on top — bbPress forums, a store locator, a spin-the-wheel gamification widget, a points system, and more. Every feature added another plugin, another stylesheet, another JavaScript bundle. The site loaded in 8+ seconds, crashed during peak traffic, and looked like a generic purple template with system fonts. Inventory across 5 Ontario locations (Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, Mississauga, London) was tracked manually in spreadsheets, leading to oversells and customer complaints. Support was phone-only, averaging 40+ calls per week. The mobile experience was unusable — a 32/100 Lighthouse score with tiny touch targets, no skeleton loading, and layout shifts on every page. For a delivery-focused cannabis business where every second of load time costs conversions, the platform was actively losing them money.
Page-by-Page Comparison
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Shop Page
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After
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About Page
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Product Detail
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Delivery & Cart
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After
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Our Solution
We rebuilt the entire platform from scratch as a headless commerce system: a Next.js 14 storefront with server-side rendering deployed on Vercel, backed by a Medusa.js v2 API server on Railway with PostgreSQL and Redis. The monorepo (managed with Turborepo) contains 449 TypeScript files across 31,700 lines of code — the storefront alone has 96+ React components and 28 pages. We built 5 custom Medusa plugins as isolated packages: @imperial/plugin-verification for government ID photo uploads to Cloudflare R2 with admin approval workflows; @imperial/plugin-loyalty for an atomic points system using Medusa Workflows with pessimistic locking and automatic compensation on failures; @imperial/plugin-mix-match for a dynamic bundle builder with tiered pricing; @imperial/plugin-messaging for Slack/SMS dispatch notifications; and @imperial/core for shared types and location services. Multi-location inventory uses publishable API keys per sales channel — customers select their nearest hub and only see products in stock at that location, with real-time updates via Redis caching. The shop page handles 334 products with rich multi-faceted filtering (strain type, THC percentage, quality grade, weight pricing) and inline add-to-cart with weight selectors. A real-time chat system using long-polling keeps customers connected to the dispatch team without WebSocket complexity. Transactional emails (order confirmations, password resets, verification status) are rendered with React Email and sent through Resend with full DKIM/SPF/DMARC authentication. The entire brand was redesigned from the generic purple WooCommerce template to a cohesive green military-inspired identity with dark/light mode, skip-to-content accessibility, and a custom design system.
Technology Stack
Next.js 14
Medusa.js v2
PostgreSQL 17
Redis 7
TypeScript
Turborepo
Cloudflare R2
React Email
Resend
Framer Motion
Zustand
Radix UI
Vitest
Playwright
Sentry
Railway
Vercel
The Results
The new platform loads in 1.4 seconds — an 83% improvement that directly increased mobile conversion rates by 120%. The Lighthouse mobile score went from 32 to 96. The live chat system cut support phone calls by 60%, from 40 to 16 per week. The Imperial Guard loyalty program drove repeat purchases from 18% to 53%, a 194% increase. Multi-location inventory tracking eliminated oversells entirely — zero stock discrepancy tickets since launch. Same-day delivery orders increased 45% after the delivery page made service areas and free-delivery thresholds ($50+ same-day, $100+ express) immediately clear. The admin team manages 334 products, 5 locations, loyalty redemptions, ID verifications, and chat sessions from a single Medusa dashboard. Deployment is fully automated — git push to main triggers Vercel builds for the storefront and Railway deploys for the API, with GitHub Actions running typecheck, lint, and tests on every commit.
Page Load Time
8.2s→1.4s
83% faster
Mobile Lighthouse
32/100→96/100
+200%
Support Calls
40/week→16/week
60% reduction
Repeat Purchases
18%→53%
+194%
“Our old site was embarrassing — it crashed, it was slow, customers called us just to ask if we were still in business. Comercii didn't just build us a website, they built us an entire operating system. The chat, the loyalty program, the multi-location inventory — it all just works. Our repeat purchase rate nearly tripled.”
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