The Challenge
TradeHub had been running a bespoke PHP system built in 2013. It had served them well for a decade, but the cracks were showing: mobile Lighthouse scores in the teens, a checkout process that required 11 steps, and a product catalog that took 48 hours to fully re-index after updates.
The real complexity was in their B2B model: 8,000 trade customers each with negotiated pricing tiers, credit accounts, company-level purchase approval workflows, and order-history access going back 7 years. Any new platform had to replicate this from day one — failure was not an option with £2.4M/month passing through the system.
Our Approach
We broke the project into four parallel workstreams, each with a dedicated team lead:
ETL pipeline built in Python to migrate 120,000 products, 8,000 customer accounts, and 7 years of order history from the legacy MySQL database to Magento" class="kw-link">Magento 2. Three parallel test migrations were run before go-live to validate data integrity.
Custom Magento B2B module for company accounts, per-customer pricing tiers, credit limit management, and a multi-level purchase approval workflow — all surfaced through a clean Hyvä-built account dashboard.
Real-time bi-directional integration with their SAP S/4HANA system for inventory levels, pricing, order dispatch, and invoice sync. Built on a RabbitMQ event bus with retry logic and full audit logging.
Full Hyvä Theme build including a custom product configurator for made-to-order items, a trade-specific mega-menu with category quicklinks, and a streamlined 3-step B2B checkout.
The Results
The most immediately visible result was the Lighthouse score improvement from 18 to 94 — a direct consequence of replacing Luma with Hyvä. Within 8 weeks of launch, organic traffic was up 34%, driven primarily by Google rewarding the Core Web Vitals improvements with ranking increases across high-value trade category pages.
"Nexcode delivered a platform that handles our B2B complexity without compromise. The SAP integration works flawlessly and the new site is three times faster. Our sales team can now quote from their phones in the warehouse — that alone has been transformative."
— Mark Hutchings, CTO, TradeHub Supplies Ltd
Key Technical Decisions
- Hyvä over standard Luma — The performance delta justified the additional development cost immediately. Lighthouse 94 vs what would have been ~25 on a standard M2 build.
- Event-driven SAP sync — Polling was ruled out due to SAP rate limits. RabbitMQ events keep inventory and pricing in sync within 30 seconds of any SAP change.
- Staged migration — We ran the legacy system and new Magento platform in parallel for 3 weeks. Customers were migrated in batches, account managers notified before each batch cutover.
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