Uplab Software

COOSH - WooCommerce exit, then four years of operating it

COOSH (cooshwear.com) is a fashion retailer whose platform we migrated from WooCommerce to Vendure in 2022 and have operated ever since. The problem. The inherited WooCommerce setup bundled database, back office and storefront onto a single server, ran a stack of third-party plugins of uneven quality, and had no version control on the live code. The ceiling was architectural, not something tuning would fix. Why Vendure. We evaluated OpenCart, Adobe Commerce, Shopify and Medusa. Shopify was ruled out on a hard requirement — it could not support the local payment providers the business needed. Vendure was the only option where market-specific commerce logic was plugin work against a documented API rather than a fight with the platform. We migrated roughly 1,500 products and split the monolith into database, Vendure back office and Next.js storefront, going live without reported business disruption. What runs today. 65 first-party plugins in production, covering local payment providers, statutory fiscal registration, national carrier integration, order intake from Instagram, a Telegram bot for the order-processing team, and CRM sync. Search has been rebuilt twice — from Postgres full-text to OpenSearch, cut over behind a differential test harness run on 106 real query shapes, which surfaced four relevance bugs that predated the migration. An Odoo ERP synchronisation layer covers products, facets, colours, customers, orders and stock levels, and feeds 18 scheduled operational reports including automated stock reconciliation. A native React Native app ships against the same Shop API as the web storefront — the clearest proof the backend is genuinely headless. Kept current, not frozen. The same production store has run on Vendure 1.8.3, 1.9, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, 3.1, 3.3, 3.5, 3.6 and now 3.7.2. Three major versions, no re-platform, no feature freeze.