Delivering Checkout Microservices On Time for a Retail Giant

From Monolith to Microservices: Driving pace and confidence in a high-stakes digital transformation

Context

A major UK retailer needed to break free from a costly legacy ecommerce system and modernise its online experience. With millions at stake in licensing fees and customer expectations rising, leadership could not afford delays. The checkout migration was the first and most critical milestone in a multi-year transformation. If it failed, the entire programme risked collapse.

Albany Beck was one of 12 delivery teams tasked with the migration. We were the only team to deliver our services on time.

The client was locked into a third-party ecommerce platform - a monolithic system that cost millions annually, slowed innovation, and introduced frequent bugs. Their vision was to move to a flexible, microservices-based stack that could support modern retailing at scale.

The stakes were high:

• 2.5 years remained on the existing licensing contract before decommissioning.
• Checkout, the first customer-facing element, had to migrate successfully or the programme could be killed.
• Teams across the business were unaligned, toolsets were incomplete, and the deployment framework was on life support.

The challenge: deliver critical checkout services (pricing, promotions, order management, and locations) on time, fully functional, and integrated, while 11 other teams fell behind schedule.

Approach

We reshaped delivery by combining deep technical expertise with strong stakeholder alignment.

• Focused scope: Prioritised high-value services with clear ownership and accountability.
• Specialist hires: Brought in retail pricing engineers with relevant experience to accelerate delivery, anticipate bottlenecks, and avoid common pitfalls.
• Technical leadership: Introduced proven practices (Domain-Driven Design, BDD, Event Storming) to map functionality and set design clarity, later adopted by other teams.
• Cross-business collaboration: Facilitated quarterly OKRs, weekly architectural forums, and regular business-led workshops to align technical, product, and delivery stakeholders.
• Framework innovation: Extended and improved cloud deployment templates, enabling faster, scalable, cloud-ready services - reused by other teams.

This blend of technical firepower and stakeholder management turned a fragmented programme into coordinated progress.

Results

Our consultants became the pace-setters of the migration, proving that timely delivery was possible.

• Only team on track: Delivered four mission-critical checkout services to deadline, with zero slippage.
• Early adopters: First to integrate new security scanning standards into cloud-native services.
• Programme enablers: Developed reusable frameworks and practices that unlocked progress for other teams.
• Confidence for leadership: Provided a clear roadmap and blueprint for future phases, ensuring the migration could continue at pace.

By meeting deadlines while others fell behind, we not only de-risked the checkout migration but also saved the client millions in legacy licensing costs and provided a scalable foundation for their ecommerce future.

Key impacts

• Only team out of 12 to deliver services on time
• Delivered fully tested, secure, cloud-deployed microservices
• Enabled cost avoidance of multi-million-pound legacy licensing fees
• Created a replicable blueprint and resourcing plan for future delivery phases

Conclusion

Albany Beck ensured that this leading retailer’s most critical migration milestone was achieved on time, unlocking momentum and leadership confidence for the wider programme. Our combination of technical depth, programme leadership, and collaborative delivery not only secured a viable checkout service but also created the blueprint for a successful, scalable digital transformation.

If your business needs support to carry out a complex tech migration, get in touch to talk about how we can help.

Get in touch