From Magento to Saleor: Scaling Portugal’s largest online electronics retailer

The breaking point

For years, Skrey pushed Magento to its limits to deliver market-leading ecommerce experiences for PCDIGA. Infrastructure costs had stabilized but remained extremely high. And realizing PCDIGA’s bold ambitions — like building a fully custom PC Configurator — was becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible. The culprit? Magento’s rigid, monolithic, plugin-based architecture.

Pulling the plug on plugins

When Skrey took over PCDIGA's Magento platform, it inherited a litany of issues: performance, reliability, scalability, feature delivery - you name it. At the onset of the project, Magento had seemed ideal: an established, feature-rich monolith easily customizable through plugin modules. It's the “easily” part of the claim that broke down in practice.

“

With Magento, if you are writing modules, you need to consider the compatibility of the whole system.

Mário Bessa, Managing Partner and CTO at Skrey

Skrey correctly anticipated that relying on off-the-shelf plugins from multiple vendors would create a maintenance nightmare. Even maintaining and extending its own custom plugins became a heavy burden. Magento released minor upgrades every two months and major ones annually — and with each release, the team had to update the core, refactor modules, and retest everything. The result: wasted developer hours, slower delivery, and declining morale.

“

It got crazy. A major Magento upgrade tied up two developers for an entire month and “minor” ones took almost half that. And the DX was so terrible that we had trouble retaining PHP developers.

Helder Rocha, Managing Partner and CSO at Skrey

Strangler pattern

PCDIGA’s feature-rich ecommerce platform made replatforming a complex challenge. In the past, the company had relied on a high-risk, all-at-once deployment strategy — an approach sometimes necessary but also increasing the risk of disruptions to customer experience and operations. For the move to Saleor, Skrey took a smoother, lower-risk path, leveraging Saleor’s composable architecture.

Using a phased approach — often called the strangler pattern — Skrey gradually replaced the old monolith’s modules with microservices. Each Magento-powered feature was migrated to Saleor only after thorough testing. Thanks to careful planning and execution, PCDIGA completed the transition with minimal, scheduled downtime.

“

PCDIGA chose to go from a best-of-suite to a best-of-breed ecommerce strategy. By being a monolith, Magento tries to address all ecommerce-related issues: catalog management, checkout and order management, CMS, customer service, you name it. This is all fine until you hit the limits of each one of those areas.

Helder Rocha, Managing Partner and CSO at Skrey

Best-of-breed at PCDIGA

Magento’s catalog model, while flexible, was notoriously inefficient. Even a small change — like adding or removing a product attribute — triggered a full catalog reindex. For 70,000+ products, that meant hours lost to unnecessary processing.

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Magento's CMS was also very limited. Things got complicated fast when PCDIGA tried to build their own complex landing pages. Their marketing teams were bogged down in messy HTML + CSS code and struggling to make things work well on the custom storefront.

Mário Bessa, Managing Partner and CTO at Skrey

Saleor's headless architecture and composable design translates to real business value for PCDIGA. Instead of thinking about the internals of the ecommerce platform, each team works with its own preferred set of tools. There was no need for additional training or operational disruption in the product, order, or stock management areas. In fact, the PCDIGA team does not even use the Saleor ecommerce Dashboard. Post-migration, the team simply continued operating smoothly with SAP for product and order management.

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Saleor allowed PCDIGA to choose the right tool for each job, rather than relying on a single swiss-army knife for every task.

João Ferreira, Engineering Manager at Skrey

Product list

PC Configurator

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The pricing of Saleor Cloud seemed reasonable, so we recommended PCDIGA go Cloud. We can always move a client to self-hosting if necessary so it's an easy recommendation to make.

Helder Rocha, Managing Partner and CSO at Skrey

From self-host as default to cloud as default

Coming from Magento, PCDIGA was used to running its ecommerce platform in-house. Continuing that tradition, the Skrey team initially planned to self-host Saleor and had even started building DevOps tooling for it. But after testing of Saleor Cloud and several in-depth discussions with Saleor’s engineers, Skrey was convinced by the platform’s security, privacy, and scalability — and has never looked back.

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One of the biggest benefits of going Saleor Cloud is access to the delivery team. Different to our past experiences, the Saleor delivery team's support is always prompt, direct, and professional.

Mário Bessa, Managing Partner and CTO at Skrey

Eliminating downtime, enhancing performance

On the old Magento site, unplanned downtime averaged around 60 minutes per month. The causes were all Magento-related — stuck indices, cache corruption, database issues, and general platform instability. Major sales events, especially Black Friday–style promotions, were a constant source of extreme stress.

Despite the team's best efforts to scale up the infrastructure, Magento timeouts were common. This resulted in lost orders, upset customers, and an overworked ecommerce team.

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To deploy something to production with Magento, we had to do database upgrades, which meant up to 10 minutes of downtime. This, plus unplanned downtime, meant PCDIGA's customers were frustrated with the shopping experience.

Mário Bessa, Managing Partner and CTO at Skrey

Saleor helped eliminate unplanned downtime. And the performance gains have been dramatic. GraphQL requests that took 40 seconds on Magento, for example, now take less than 0.4 seconds on Saleor - a 99% reduction.

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The platform doesn't block us. We deliver new PCDIGA features quickly. And we're doing it all at a reasonable, predictable cost, which makes our client happy.

Helder Rocha, Managing Partner and CSO at Skrey

Saleor: A Plugin-Free, Composable Solution

Skrey briefly explored alternatives to Saleor but quickly dismissed them as little more than modern takes on Magento’s same flawed, plugin-based approach to extensibility.

“

We looked at Medusa and a couple of others, but they weren't tech agnostic. You still end up with the Magento monolith and the plugin problems.

Mário Bessa, Managing Partner and CTO at Skrey

With Saleor, Skrey found an extensibility model it could believe in: with apps/extensions fully-isolated from core code and from one another. In contrast to plugin-based architectures, Saleor apps do not directly touch database or core files. Instead, ecommerce data and functions are accessed solely through Saleor's GraphQL API and webhooks.

For a technical overview of Saleor's extensibility,
please check our docs.

Saleor's extensibility model freed Skrey from the headache of merge conflicts between PCDIGA's bespoke apps, core code, and third-party apps. It also enabled Skrey to accelerate innovation at PCDIGA. A bonus was that Saleor's tech-agnostic model allowed apps to be written in any language and on any framework.

“

Saleor's tech-agnostic approach to extensibility allowed us to work independently on multiple independent work-threads. We were building as many as six apps at one time. We've built 11 apps for Saleor and it's a breeze.

João Ferreira, Engineering Manager at Skrey