Merging platforms, modernizing the stack

When Desenio acquired The Poster Store, the combined company got more than a larger share of the affordable wall art market—it inherited a doubled workload. With two backends and two deployment pipelines to maintain, the engineering team faced a choice: continue duct-taping a monolithic setup together, or use the merger as an opportunity to rebuild.

The problems with the old architecture were compounded over time. A simple change took roughly 20 minutes to propagate across edge servers, and another two hours before customers saw the update live. Testing was equally painful, since the site ran five different languages and previews could only cover one or two at a time. That friction discouraged experimentation and slowed the team down exactly when they needed to move faster.

Despite an initial reluctance to adopt third-party software, the team made an exception for Vercel. As frontend developer Dash Donnergren put it, they lacked the technical know-how, time, and resources to build a networking backend that could match Vercel's capabilities. The benefits outweighed the costs.

"With Vercel, we know what we’re pushing into production is close to perfect. That’s incredibly important because as an ecommerce platform, our website is everything."

Dash Donnergren, Frontend Developer

Key features driving the transformation

Several Vercel capabilities were central to the team's new workflow, helping them ship faster and scale into new territories.

  • Preview Deployments: Engineers can iterate quickly, share work with stakeholders, and maintain a history of ideas before anything touches production.
  • Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR): With thousands of pages across many markets, full static deploys would take hours. ISR keeps build times to just a few minutes.
  • Next.js Redirects: The Poster Store left behind many indexed URLs in Google. Managing redirects within the Next.js codebase keeps them close to the rest of the application, making them simple to handle and update.

This new flexibility freed the team to focus on improving the site itself rather than babysitting infrastructure. They reexamined the cart experience, tried new product presentation approaches, and improved accessibility scores, making the site usable for more people globally.

"Vercel is sort of like the peanut butter to a jam sandwich. You can choose to have it without the jam and have a peanut butter sandwich, but you can also choose to have it with something unorthodox like ketchup. It doesn't force you into a specific pattern of solving a problem. It gives us the power to create the solution that works best for us."

Results that scaled

The improvements translated directly into stronger business metrics: a 37% lower bounce rate, 48% longer sessions, and a 34% improvement in site conversions. The team also went from duplicate pipelines to a single unified workflow, which meant faster iterations and greater confidence in every release.

Armed with a new toolbelt and the ability to experiment freely, The Desenio Group launched 30 new markets in a single month—bringing its ambition of becoming the largest global distributor of wall art much closer to reality. For an ecommerce business where the website is the product, that kind of agility isn't just a nice-to-have; it's the foundation for future growth.