Home Furniture & Decor • Global Retail Brand
Crate & Barrel’s Middle East franchise team needed a scalable, high-performance ecommerce platform to manage a large product catalogue, two store views (UAE and Saudi Arabia) and omnichannel retail operations. StageBit designed and developed a fully customised Magento 2 storefront aligned with the brand’s global standards while supporting regional business requirements across both markets.
In a short discovery call, we review your catalogue complexity, omnichannel needs, ERP integrations and outline a Magento 2 roadmap aligned with your retail goals.
Revenue growth
+620%
Within one year of launch.
Initial sales lift
+200%
After the first month.
Traffic increase
+78%
Driven by improved UX & performance.
Conversion lift
+42%
Optimised customer journeys.
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The new Magento 2 experience
Key screens from the Magento 2 rebuild — multi-store support, streamlined shopping journeys, enterprise integrations and a mobile-first experience designed for UAE and Saudi Arabia customers.
Homepage — enterprise Magento 2 storefront
Fully customized Magento 2 experience designed for Crate & Barrel and Crate Kids, supporting multi-store operations, regional merchandising and omnichannel retail journeys.
Checkout — optimized conversion-focused purchase flow
Simplified customer journey with integrated payments, improved usability and streamlined checkout processes that contributed to a 42% increase in conversions.
Product discovery — thousands of SKUs organised for scale
Custom catalog architecture, intuitive navigation and enterprise-grade merchandising make it easier for customers to browse furniture, décor and lifestyle collections.
Mobile storefront — built for modern omnichannel shoppers
Responsive Magento 2 frontend optimized for performance, usability and engagement across smartphones and tablets, helping increase traffic by 78%.
Client overview
Crate & Barrel is an international retailer of contemporary furniture, housewares and décor, with over 100 stores and franchise partners across 9 countries. Their Middle East franchise operates in UAE and Saudi Arabia under the Crate & Barrel and Crate Kids brands, serving a high-value customer base across both markets.
What Crate & Barrel asked for
“We had two brands, two countries and a product range that changes every season. We needed a platform our team could actually manage — without calling a developer every time something changed in the catalogue or a new promotion needed to go live.”
Is this you?
Crate & Barrel’s operational challenges reflect what many franchise retailers face when scaling ecommerce across multiple markets. If these points sound familiar, this case study is your blueprint.
Goals & success criteria
Before any design or development began, StageBit and Crate & Barrel’s team agreed on a set of non-negotiable outcomes. These shaped every architectural decision — from multi-store setup to checkout flow to ERP integration.
Two separate Magento 2 store views — one for UAE, one for Saudi Arabia — each supporting Crate & Barrel and Crate Kids, with independent pricing, currency and content management.
Dynamics 365 had to remain the single source of truth for inventory, orders and customer data — no manual exports, no sync delays, no duplicate data entry across systems.
The store had to be fast on mobile — especially in the UAE and KSA markets where mobile commerce dominates and network conditions vary. Performance was a KPI, not an afterthought.
UAE and Saudi customers expect specific local payment options. A default Magento 2 checkout with generic gateway support was not acceptable — the checkout had to match how the market pays.
The Crate & Barrel team manages seasonal campaigns, product launches and promotions continuously. The Magento 2 admin had to support this without engineering support for routine updates.
The franchise was planning growth. The Magento 2 platform had to support adding new store views, new brands and new integrations without a full redevelopment cycle each time.
Magento 2 features
The Magento 2 build wasn’t a template deployment. Every feature was designed around the operational reality of running two brands across two Middle East markets — catalogue at scale, a checkout built for regional payment behaviour and a back-office that talks to Dynamics 365.
Catalogue & navigation
A custom Magento 2 mega menu structures the combined Crate & Barrel and Crate Kids catalogue by category, room, use-case and brand — so customers reach the right product in fewer clicks without being overwhelmed by range depth.
Checkout & payments
The default multi-step Magento 2 checkout was replaced with a streamlined one-page flow integrated with Checkout.com — supporting the card payment methods and local options expected by UAE and Saudi Arabia shoppers.
Back-office & ERP
Products, stock levels and orders sync automatically between Magento 2 and Dynamics 365, so the finance, marketing and operations teams all work from a single source of truth — no manual exports, no data drift between systems.
Logistics & delivery
Checkout includes Google Maps Places API for accurate address entry — critical in UAE and KSA where street addressing varies. Orders connect to Aramex for label generation, tracking and last-mile delivery across both markets.
This stack is typical for enterprise retail brands operating multi-store Magento 2 platforms across the GCC region with ERP-driven catalogue and order management.
Approach
From the initial UAE site visit through to post-launch support, the approach was built around one constraint: no shortcuts that create technical debt. Every phase had a defined exit criteria before the next began.
Phase 1
On-site visit to Crate & Barrel’s UAE store to review operations, catalogue structure and integration requirements. Scope finalised with the client team before any design began.
Phase 2
InVision prototypes validated with the client before development began. Magento 2 multi-store environment built with custom theme, Dynamics 365 integration layer and regional checkout configured for UAE and KSA payment methods.
Phase 3
Full testing across all page templates, checkout flows, integration points and devices. Performance validated against Core Web Vitals targets on real mobile hardware before sign-off.
Phase 4
Staged go-live with rollback plan in place. Post-launch monitoring, performance tracking and retainer support for catalogue management, integrations and seasonal campaigns.
The decisions that made it work
Multi-store setup — two markets, two brands — was the most structurally complex part of the project. We built and validated the store view architecture and Dynamics 365 sync in a dedicated environment before any theme or frontend work began. Changes to multi-store structure after theming are expensive; getting it right first is not optional.
Interactive prototypes for homepage, category, product and checkout were built in InVision and reviewed with the Crate & Barrel team before any development began. This eliminated the most expensive type of rework — design changes discovered during development.
UAE and KSA are mobile-first markets. Lighthouse scores on a MacBook don’t reflect a customer on a mid-range Android in Dubai. Performance testing ran on real devices across the mobile network conditions common in both markets — not just controlled lab environments.
Dynamics 365, Checkout.com and Aramex were all integrated and tested with real data in staging during Phase 2. By the time QA started in Phase 3, every integration had already processed test orders end-to-end. Nothing was “we’ll sort it post-launch.”
Tech stack
Crate & Barrel’s Magento 2 store runs on a focused stack built for the GCC market: Magento 2 for the storefront, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for ERP and CRM, and a small set of regional services for payments and logistics.
Storefront
Custom Magento 2 theme with separate store views for UAE and KSA, supporting Crate & Barrel and Crate Kids with independent pricing, currency and content.
Back-office & ERP
Dynamics 365 drives products, stock and order data. Magento 2 syncs downstream — no duplicated business logic, no manual reconciliation.
Design & UX
All key templates prototyped and client-approved in InVision before development began. Navigation, checkout flow and product pages validated on interactive mockups.
Payments & logistics
Checkout.com handles card payments across UAE and KSA. Aramex manages last-mile delivery. Google Maps Places API handles address entry — essential in markets without standardised postcodes.
For multi-market ecommerce in the GCC, tool selection is as important as platform choice. We match the stack to the region — not the other way around.
Results
The Magento 2 platform went live and the improvements were measurable from the first month. Performance, conversion, traffic and revenue all moved in the right direction — and stayed there.
Revenue — first month
Month-one post-launch comparison
Baseline
Pre-launch revenue reference point.
+200%
First month after go-live.
Revenue — year one
12-month organic revenue growth
Fragmented channels
No structured organic or ecommerce channel in place.
+620%
Revenue growth within 12 months of launch.
Bounce rate
Visitor engagement signal
Above industry benchmark
Slow load times and poor mobile UX driving early exits.
29%
After new Magento 2 storefront.
Conversion rate
Purchase completion rate
Multi-step checkout friction
Complex checkout flow losing customers at payment step.
+42%
After one-page checkout with regional payment integration.
Organic traffic
SEO-driven reach
Limited organic visibility
No technical SEO foundation — slow pages, poor crawlability.
+78%
After performance and SEO improvements in Magento 2.
The results in month one were the most visible — +200% in sales — but the more significant outcome was that growth held and compounded. Twelve months after launch, revenue was up 620%. That kind of trajectory doesn’t happen from a template deployment.
The foundation was the right architecture for the market: a multi-store Magento 2 setup built around how the Crate & Barrel team actually operates, with Dynamics 365 as the system of record and a checkout that matched how UAE and Saudi customers pay.
The +78% traffic increase came from the performance improvements — faster load times, clean markup and a mobile experience that reflected the brand properly on the devices most of their customers use.
Next steps
Crate & Barrel’s project is one example of how we handle Magento 2 builds for franchise and multi-store retailers. If your situation sounds similar — large catalogue, ERP integration, multi-region operations — the next step is a short discovery call.
Suited to mid-market and enterprise retailers with multi-store, ERP integration or omnichannel requirements on Magento 2.
More client stories
If Crate & Barrel’s Magento 2 multi-store and omnichannel project resonates with your goals, these case studies showcase how we handle complex integrations, performance tuning, and scalable eCommerce solutions.
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Rohit Kundale, Our VP of Sales and Marketing is ready to meet with your team.
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