How Harry Rosen Turned a Cost-Saving Checkout Migration Into a Conversion Lift

Harry Rosen has partnered with Orium since 2018, and for several years its browse, product, and cart experiences ran on commercetools while checkout ran on a separate third-party product. That setup made sense at launch, because the checkout arrived with its integrations already built, but the checkout was a closed product Harry Rosen's developers could not extend, so every improvement to the final step depended on someone else's roadmap.

The two-platform pattern also carried a running integration cost. Carts were copied from commercetools to the checkout platform at the handoff, and it was creating unwanted moments of friction: a pair of socks added on the cart page might not appear at checkout; gift cards could lock mid-transaction; valid addresses were rejected by validation; and fraud screening ran only after payment had been authorized.

None of that was ideal, but the most expensive gap was harder to see on a balance sheet. Harry Rosen held rich data on its clients, including tier, purchase history, sizes, and preferences, and a client who signed in got almost nothing for it. For a retailer whose reputation rests on advisors who know their clients, the gap was as much a brand issue as an experience one.

As Vanessa Marko, Sr. Director of eCommerce framed it: “Shopping with a trusted style advisor in a Harry Rosen store is a special experience: the advisor knows a client's preferences and history. Our challenge was to bring that sense of being known and recognized to the cart and checkout experience online. The goal was to remember and surface each customer's preferences, and to make the process simple enough that customers can focus on what matters: looking and feeling their best, for every occasion.”

When commercetools Checkout entered the picture as a viable alternative to their existing checkout solution, Harry Rosen and Orium worked through a technical feasibility assessment before committing to the move.

Harry Rosen's case rested on two strategic reasons: the first was a deliberately simpler stack, with one platform carrying what several partners used to and fewer contracts, integrations, and handoffs in the path to purchase. The second was personalization by design: commercetools Checkout runs as a payments-only service that handles the transaction, and Harry Rosen owns the entire experience around it. That split let Harry Rosen personalize every step of checkout without taking on the PCI compliance scope that comes with handling card data directly.

That division of labour also answers a fair question about consolidation in a MACH stack. Moving checkout onto the same vendor as the commerce engine reduced the number of products in the path without giving up composability, because the experience layer stayed Harry Rosen's to design and the surrounding services stayed best-of-breed.

Orium designed and built the new cart and checkout around the returning client. Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal now sit directly on the cart, and a returning client with a saved card and a previous delivery address can go from cart to confirmed order in one tap. Saved cards surface at payment, saved addresses pre-populate on sign-in, and Sign in with Apple recognizes the client on the cart and login pages, so most returning clients have nothing to type.

Loyalty moved forward in the journey too. Club Harry, the loyalty program Orium previously rebuilt on Talon.One, now lives in the cart, where clients see the points each item earns, see their balance immediately, and redeem with a single toggle that re-prices the order in real time. Points, a gift card, and a credit card can combine in one order. Diamond members get tier-aware free shipping, cart recommendations come from Algolia, the in-store pickup selector defaults to the client's home store, and Forter now screens orders for fraud before authorization. The whole experience is bilingual, and FinalCut, Harry Rosen's sister banner, runs on the same codebase.

Checkout is the one part of a commerce site where a bad release costs money immediately, so Harry Rosen treated the cutover like an infrastructure change. Employees used the new checkout first in the real production environment. Then 30% of customer traffic moved over while the previous checkout stayed live as a safety net, with defined gates for each weekly increase. Both storefronts reached 100% on July 17, 2026, with no rollbacks and no financial impact on customers.

Harry Rosen's own post-launch debrief is candid about what it would tighten next time. Its team recommends adding event-integrity checks to go-live QA alongside functional testing, and deciding before launch which system owns any order state that two systems can both write, such as gift card balances after a declined fraud check.

Harry Rosen compared the 45 days after full cutover with the six weeks before it. On harryrosen.com, mobile checkout conversion rose 40% and conversion across all devices rose by more than a third. Cart abandonment fell four points, the share of returning visitors who were signed in rose from 46% to 54%, and the fraud approval rate improved by a full point. Apple Pay is now the leading tender across both banners at 27.65% of transactions, ahead of Visa, and one-tap checkout already accounts for roughly 19–25% of orders.

Harry Rosen is already extending the new cart and checkout, and the direction is to shift payment left, so clients can buy earlier and earlier in the journey. The next step is bringing the same express payment options onto product detail and product listing pages, so a client can buy without visiting the cart at all. The larger opportunity comes from Harry Rosen's new customer relationship management (CRM) system, which can now feed checkout directly. That opens up advisor-built carts sent to clients ready to purchase, and offers shaped by each client's history, from basket-building incentives for frequent buyers to more conservative offers for clients who return a lot.

For retailers running a best-of-breed stack, the takeaway is to count the integration cost of each product boundary honestly, including the experience you can't build across it. Harry Rosen approved its checkout as a cost line to consolidate, and its team used the opportunity to re-design for the clients it already knew.

"We built this on a cost-savings business case, so the conversion gains are icing on a cake that paid for itself." said Rakesh Krishna, VP Product and Engineering at Harry Rosen. "Owning the cart and checkout means everything we add from here, from buying on product pages to offers shaped by our CRM, can stay focused on our clients."