Furniture headless commerce case study

Furniture headless commerce on Shopify

How Starcodia implemented headless commerce for a home furnishings brand using Shopify Hydrogen, creating a content-rich experience with room visualization that achieved sub-second load times and a marked improvement in mobile conversion.

Client details are anonymized and figures are shown as indicative ranges in line with our confidentiality policy. We can share specific results and references under NDA.

Client context

A premium home furnishings brand was constrained by their existing Liquid theme. Their brand experience centered on editorial content, room inspiration and lifestyle storytelling, but the commerce and content felt disconnected. Page load times had crept above three seconds as they added rich imagery, impacting mobile experience in particular.

The brand wanted an experience that felt more like an interior design magazine than a traditional ecommerce store. Room visualization, editorial content and product shopping needed to blend seamlessly. They also needed performance that would score well on Core Web Vitals and support their mobile-heavy traffic.

After evaluating options, the team decided headless was the right approach for their content-rich requirements.

The challenge

The headless project needed to deliver on several fronts:

  • Create a content-rich experience that blended editorial and commerce seamlessly
  • Achieve sub-second page loads for excellent Core Web Vitals scores
  • Integrate with a headless CMS for editorial content management
  • Support room visualization with 3D models and AR viewing
  • Maintain SEO performance through proper server-side rendering
  • Enable content team to publish without developer involvement

The brand wanted to use Shopify's native headless framework rather than a generic solution.

What Starcodia delivered

Starcodia built a headless storefront using Shopify Hydrogen deployed on Oxygen.

Hydrogen storefront. The frontend was built in Hydrogen, Shopify's React-based framework for headless commerce. This provided tight integration with Shopify's Storefront API and commerce primitives while giving full control over the frontend experience.

CMS integration. Sanity was integrated as the headless CMS, allowing the content team to manage editorial content, room inspiration galleries and landing pages independently. Product data came from Shopify while editorial content came from Sanity, unified in the frontend.

Room visualization. Product pages included room context galleries showing furniture in styled settings. For products with 3D models, AR viewing allowed customers to place items in their own space using their phone camera.

Performance optimization. The build was optimized for performance from the start: edge caching on Oxygen, optimized image loading, streaming SSR, and careful attention to JavaScript bundle size. Critical CSS was inlined and non-essential scripts deferred.

SEO architecture. Server-side rendering ensured all content was visible to search engines. Structured data, meta tags and sitemaps were generated dynamically. Existing URL structures were maintained with proper redirects from the legacy theme.

Shopify checkout. Cart functionality used Shopify's cart API, handing off to Shopify's hosted checkout for payment. This preserved checkout reliability and payment integrations while allowing full frontend customization.

Results

The headless implementation delivered on performance and experience goals:

  • Sub-second page loads. Average page load dropped to under one second, with LCP consistently around a second, dramatically improving Core Web Vitals scores.
  • A marked mobile conversion improvement. Faster performance and improved mobile UX increased mobile conversion significantly compared to the previous theme.
  • Seamless content and commerce. Editorial content and product shopping now flow together naturally, supporting the brand's storytelling approach.
  • Content team autonomy. Editorial and merchandising teams publish content independently through Sanity, without developer tickets for routine updates.
  • SEO performance maintained. Organic traffic recovered post-launch and continued growth trajectory, with improved rankings for competitive furniture keywords.

Services and capabilities demonstrated

Discuss a similar project

If you are evaluating headless commerce for a content-rich experience, Starcodia can share more details and discuss whether headless is the right approach for your requirements.

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