A common commerce foundation can help global retailers move from fragmented execution to scalable delivery.
Global retailers rarely struggle because they lack ambition. More often, they struggle because growth across regions has created a commerce landscape full of exceptions: local customizations, duplicate code, uneven release practices and storefronts that evolve independently until every upgrade becomes expensive, slow and risky. In that environment, modernization cannot be defined only by a new platform. It must also create a simpler, more maintainable way to build, release and optimize digital commerce across markets.
That was the challenge facing Pandora in APAC. The brand’s regional e-commerce environment was running on an outdated Salesforce Commerce implementation with unique customizations and local flexibility requirements that had become costly and labor-intensive to maintain. At the same time, Pandora’s broader digital commerce presence across markets had become fragmented, limiting consistency and slowing the organization’s ability to introduce improvements efficiently.
Publicis Sapient helped Pandora address this challenge by focusing on more than a technical upgrade. The work centered on creating a common codebase, shared functionality and a common storefront implementation across e-commerce platforms, so releases could be maintained more efficiently across the organization. In APAC specifically, we decoupled the region’s unique custom code and rebuilt it from scratch, removing redundant and duplicate code that had made future maintenance harder than it needed to be.
This kind of engineering decision matters because custom complexity compounds over time. A regional workaround may solve an immediate business need, but when those workarounds pile up, every release carries more friction. Teams spend more time reconciling differences, testing region-specific variations and managing upgrade dependencies than delivering new value. The result is a commerce estate that technically functions, but operationally resists change.
Pandora’s modernization took a different path. Using agile development processes, Publicis Sapient worked with the business to uncover and prioritize the most important initiatives, then expedited migration and deployment of the updated Salesforce Commerce application in just over two months. The speed was important, but the bigger outcome was structural: Pandora gained a commerce foundation designed to support ongoing release efficiency, scalability and simpler maintenance over time.
The impact was immediate and measurable. Migration time was cut in half. Release velocity improved from several months to a matter of weeks. After the first successful migration, Pandora’s e-commerce applications required no additional downtime. For a global retailer, those improvements represent far more than delivery metrics. They mean regional teams can respond faster to market demands, platform owners can reduce the burden of supporting fragmented implementations and the business can launch new capabilities without waiting on long, high-risk release cycles.
Just as importantly, the commerce work fit into a broader effort to make Pandora more agile as an organization. Publicis Sapient helped remove silos between marketing, commercial operations and technology, while applying cross-functional ways of working and a test-and-learn approach. That broader operating model enabled Pandora to move with greater speed and agility, including launching new omnichannel experiences such as click-and-collect, find in-store, store locators, virtual queuing and in-store appointment booking in under three months.
This is an important lesson for retail leaders evaluating commerce modernization today. A shared codebase alone will not transform release performance if teams still work in silos, governance remains fragmented or every market treats the platform as a separate build. True modernization happens when the technology foundation and the operating model reinforce each other. Shared functionality reduces duplication. Agile delivery shortens the path from idea to production. Cross-functional collaboration reduces handoff friction. Managed services and ongoing optimization help ensure the platform keeps improving after the initial migration is complete.
Pandora’s experience also shows that common-codebase modernization does not mean ignoring local market needs. In APAC, local flexibility requirements were real. The goal was not to erase regional nuance, but to separate what truly needed localization from what should be standardized. That distinction is critical for global retailers. If everything is treated as unique, scale disappears. If everything is forced into a rigid global template, local performance can suffer. The right model creates a stable shared core while allowing for market-specific variation where it delivers real value.
That same principle extends beyond the storefront. In Pandora’s broader transformation, modernization of order management improved real-time inventory visibility, supported ship-to-home, optimized returns and refunds and enabled services such as Click-and-Collect and Store Fulfillment. Together, these capabilities strengthened the omnichannel foundation and created the opportunity to scale improvements into additional markets over time. The result was not just a better commerce stack, but a more unified retail model across channels.
For global retailers, this is the real promise of modernization. It is not simply replatforming from one version to another or replacing legacy code for its own sake. It is building a commerce environment that is easier to maintain, faster to evolve and better suited to support launches across regions. It is reducing duplicate effort so teams can focus on innovation. It is making upgrades less disruptive. And it is creating the conditions for ongoing optimization instead of repeated reinvention.
Publicis Sapient brings that perspective by combining strategy, experience, engineering and enterprise platform expertise in one transformation approach. In Pandora’s case, that meant helping define priorities, modernize Salesforce Commerce, simplify APAC-specific complexity, accelerate releases and continue the relationship through managed services and support for new upgrades. The value of that model is continuity: modernization does not stop at go-live. It becomes an ongoing capability.
For retailers operating across multiple regions, banners or market maturity levels, the takeaway is clear. If release cycles still take months, if every regional enhancement creates new technical debt or if upgrades feel like one-off migration programs instead of routine progress, the issue is bigger than platform versioning. It is a sign that the codebase, storefront model and delivery operating model need to be modernized together.
A common commerce foundation can help global retailers move from fragmented execution to scalable delivery. With the right architecture, agile ways of working and ongoing optimization support, organizations can launch faster, upgrade more easily and reduce the friction that slows innovation across markets. Pandora’s work offers a practical blueprint: simplify what has become overly custom, standardize what should be shared and build an operating model that turns modernization into sustained delivery velocity.