3x Faster Page Speed, Higher Conversions, and Reduced Costs for OBI

As Europe’s leading home improvement retailer, OBI seamlessly connects e-commerce with omnichannel customer journeys, where users extensively research products online before completing their purchases in-store. This massive digital footprint generates more than 700 million search queries per year, highlighting the mission-critical role of a flawless, high-performance platform search.

Historically, the platform relied on a legacy search technology that lacked the necessary flexibility and customizability. As OBI's digital business rapidly scaled, the demands on the search engine - serving as the central entry point for the entire customer journey - outgrew the capabilities of the existing infrastructure.

The core challenge laid within the legacy search architecture, which failed to adapt to OBI's sophisticated business logic. Critical pain points included:

• Rigid Merchandising Control: Ranking and sorting mechanisms for search results allowed only minimal customization.

• High Operational Overhead: Any modification required extensive configuration effort and deep technical intervention.

• Complex Omnichannel Requirements: Implementing domain-specific logic—such as dynamic, market-specific pricing and real-time local store inventory - proved highly complex and unstable.

The legacy technology had clearly reached its absolute limit. New technical requirements could only be sustained through fragile workarounds, leaving the e-commerce team with virtually no control over search relevance and underlying logic. For the internal product teams, the search engine operated essentially as a "black box".

This lack of control over market-specific data, intricate product assortment structures, and specialized search logic resulted in severe developmental complexity - ultimately causing friction in the user experience and suboptimal search results for end-consumers.

To systematically overcome legacy infrastructure limitations, OBI transitioned to a highly scalable enterprise search architecture built entirely on a modern, open-source engine.

Deployed as a resilient cloud native infrastructure, the solution leverages a high-performance Java backend, a modular Vue.js frontend, and a dynamic, auto-scaling Kubernetes environment. By indexing product data directly within the core engine, the e-commerce team can now modify search logic seamlessly on the fly and exert precise control over product visibility. The entire search platform is fully customizable—empowering both technical engineering teams and digital merchandisers with complete functional autonomy.