edubily: From Shopify to Headless Commerce for the Swiss Market

The Challenge

edubily sells nutritional supplements to health-conscious customers across Switzerland and neighbouring countries. The business grew fast. The tech stack did not keep up.

Their Shopify store had served them well in the early days, but the Swiss market has specific demands that Shopify was never built for. The problems had been accumulating for months:

• No Wallee integration: Switzerland’s most common payment provider — covering bank transfers, Twint, and PostFinance — had no native Shopify connector. edubily relied on a third-party workaround that broke after every Shopify update.
• Weak multi-currency support: Shopify’s currency handling was clunky. Swiss customers expected to pay in CHF. Cross-border customers needed EUR. Switching between the two created inconsistent pricing displays and checkout friction.
• Slow page loads: Shopify’s generic theme engine added overhead. Product pages loaded in 3.8 seconds on average. For a brand competing on trust and transparency, slow pages eroded credibility.
• Limited SEO control: Shopify restricted access to meta tags, structured data, and URL structures. Product pages lacked proper schema markup. Google ranked competitors with better technical SEO higher — despite edubily having stronger content.
• Compliance headaches: Swiss health regulations require specific labelling for supplements — dosage information, allergen warnings, regulatory disclaimers. Shopify’s Liquid templates made these custom layouts painful to build and harder to maintain.
• Platform fees: Shopify’s transaction fees and app subscriptions added up. At edubily’s volume, the platform was taking a noticeable cut of every sale.

edubily needed a storefront they owned — one that could handle Swiss payments, Swiss regulations, and Swiss customer expectations without workarounds.

The Approach

We migrated edubily to a headless commerce architecture in three phases over twelve weeks. No big-bang cutover. Each phase went live independently so the team could validate before moving on.

Phase 1: Commerce Engine and Storefront (Weeks 1–5)

We replaced Shopify with two systems working together: Medusa v2 as the commerce backend and Next.js 15 as the customer-facing storefront.

Medusa v2 handles the core commerce logic — product catalogue, inventory, orders, pricing, and promotions. It runs on edubily’s own infrastructure. No platform fees. No vendor lock-in. The team manages products through Medusa’s admin dashboard, which covers everything Shopify’s admin did, without the monthly bill.

For the storefront, we built a Next.js 15 application using the App Router. Every product page renders server-side, which means search engines see the full content on first load — no JavaScript required. We configured edge caching through Vercel so pages load from the nearest point of presence. Average page load dropped from 3.8 seconds to 1.4 seconds.

We migrated 340 products, 12 collections, and the complete order history. Customers logged in with their existing accounts — we mapped Shopify customer records to Medusa profiles with no data loss.

Phase 2: Payments and Multi-Currency (Weeks 6–8)

We integrated Wallee directly into the checkout flow. Swiss customers can now pay with Twint, PostFinance, bank transfer, or credit card — all through a single payment provider, no workarounds, no third-party plugins that break on update day.

Multi-currency works properly. CHF is the default for Swiss customers, detected by IP geolocation. EUR is available for customers in Germany, Austria, and the rest of Europe. Prices are maintained separately per currency in Medusa — no live conversion with fluctuating rates. The customer sees one price, pays that price, done.

We also added Apple Pay and Google Pay for mobile checkout. Mobile accounts for 62% of edubily’s traffic, so reducing checkout friction there had a direct impact on conversion.

Phase 3: Search, Compliance, and Performance (Weeks 9–12)

We deployed MeiliSearch as the product search engine. Shopify’s built-in search was basic — no typo tolerance, no faceted filtering, no instant results. MeiliSearch returns results in under 50 milliseconds with typo correction, synonym matching, and filters for category, price range, dietary type, and allergen information.

For regulatory compliance, we built a custom supplement labelling module. Each product can carry structured compliance data: ingredients with dosages, allergen declarations, Swiss health authority registration numbers, and regulatory disclaimers. This data renders consistently across product pages, cart summaries, and order confirmations — one source of truth, no copy-paste between templates.

Finally, we implemented proper structured data across every product page: Product schema with price, availability, reviews, and nutritional information. Google started showing rich results within three weeks of launch.

The Results

Three months after the migration, the numbers confirmed what the team already felt: the new stack was working.

• Page load time dropped 60%. From 3.8 seconds to 1.4 seconds average. Server-side rendering and edge caching made the difference. Core Web Vitals moved from amber to green across all product pages.
• Organic search traffic increased 35%. Better Core Web Vitals, proper structured data, and clean URL structures pushed edubily higher in search results. Product pages started appearing in Google rich results for supplement-related queries.
• Full multi-currency support. CHF and EUR with stable, managed pricing. No conversion surprises. Checkout completion rates for cross-border customers improved noticeably.
• Zero platform fees. Medusa is open-source and self-hosted. The Shopify subscription, transaction fees, and app add-ons — all gone. Infrastructure costs are a fraction of what Shopify charged.
• Compliance labels render correctly everywhere. The custom module handles Swiss supplement regulations without template hacks. Adding a new compliance field takes minutes, not a development sprint.
• Product search in under 50ms. MeiliSearch handles typos, synonyms, and faceted filtering. Customers find what they need faster. Search-driven conversions increased.

edubily’s team now controls their storefront completely. New features ship without waiting for a Shopify app to exist. Pricing changes happen in Medusa’s admin, not through CSV imports. Payment processing works reliably — no more post-update breakages.

The supplements keep selling. The platform stays out of the way.