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D2C bicycles · Pune, IndiaShopify themes → Hydrogen + Next.js5 weeks · Q2 2025

How a custom bicycle brand
cut cart abandonment by 38%
without changing checkout.

Northwind Cycles sells ₹85k–₹3L premium custom bikes online. They had a Shopify storefront on a ₹14,000 theme that took 4 seconds to load product pages. We rebuilt the storefront on Next.js + Shopify Hydrogen — same products, same Shopify backend, same checkout. Just 18× faster.

PageSpeed score
5897
+39
Time to first byte
1.4s80ms
18×
Conversion rate
1.8%3.1%
+72%
Industry
D2C e-commerce
Catalog size
120 SKUs · 6 collections
Monthly orders
~280 (pre) → ~520 (post)
Avg. order value
₹1,12,000
Tech stack
Next.js · Hydrogen · Sanity
Hosting
Vercel + Shopify CDN
Timeline
5 weeks
Investment
₹3,40,000
The problem

Slow product pages
were eating the funnel.

4.1s product page LCP

Hero image (3.2MB), 14 third-party scripts, theme blocking render. Mobile users gave up before seeing the price.

Cart abandonment at 78%

Industry average is 70%. For ₹1L+ bikes, every abandoned cart is real money. Mostly happening at the cart drawer, before checkout.

Theme + apps spaghetti

12 Shopify apps. Each one injecting scripts. Reviews app alone added 800ms. Customizer app broke every Shopify theme update.

Search inside the catalog was bad

Default Shopify search ignored frame size, gear count, color — the things customers actually filter by. Filtering reloaded the whole page.

Mobile experience was 2018-tier

Image gallery janked. Spec table overflowed. "Build your bike" customizer was unusable on phones — and 64% of traffic was mobile.

The solution

Headless storefront. Native Shopify checkout.

Shopify keeps doing what it does best — payments, inventory, fulfillment. Everything else moves to a Next.js + Hydrogen frontend deployed at the edge.

Next.js + Hydrogen storefront

Static product pages with on-demand revalidation. Product shoots load instantly. Filtering happens client-side, no page reloads.

Shopify Storefront API for live data

Cart, inventory, customer accounts — all driven by Shopify. We never re-built what they already had.

Sanity for editorial content

Collection pages, blog, custom landing pages — all in Sanity. Marketing team ships campaigns without dev tickets.

Vercel edge deployment

80ms TTFB anywhere in India. Image optimization automatic. Sub-resource bundles streamed.

Pagefind product search

Filter by frame size, gear count, color, terrain — instant, client-side, with proper faceted UI. Better than the ₹4k/mo search app they had.

Build-your-bike customizer

Rebuilt the customizer in React. Mobile-first this time. Each config saves to Shopify as a draft order.

The numbers

Before. After.

PageSpeed Mobile
5897
PageSpeed Desktop
74100
Largest Contentful Paint
4.1s0.6s
Time to First Byte
1.4s80ms
Cart abandonment
78%48%
Conversion rate
1.8%3.1%
Avg. session duration
1m 12s2m 48s
Mobile bounce rate
64%31%
Monthly hosting cost
₹14k (theme + apps)₹2.4k
"

We doubled monthly orders without spending a rupee more on ads. The site just stopped losing people. Their team treats e-commerce performance like a real engineering problem — they were showing me Cloudflare Analytics graphs in our weekly call. That kind of obsession is rare.

VK
Vikram Krishnan
Founder, Northwind Cycles
90 days post-launch

The bottom-line impact.

Monthly orders
+86%
280 → 520
Revenue / month
+₹2.7Cr
Same ad spend
ROI on migration
11×
In first 90 days
Hosting cost
−83%
₹14k → ₹2.4k

Got a Shopify theme
holding you back?

We migrate Shopify storefronts to headless in 4–6 weeks. Same checkout, same backend, dramatically faster experience.

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