How to Lift and Shift Your Next.js Storefront to a Spree 5 Backend
Running a Next.js storefront on a legacy backend that’s become a security liability, a cost center, or a feature bottleneck? This guide shows you how to lift and shift your existing frontend to Spree 5 – the modern open-source eCommerce platform – without disrupting your customers, sacrificing your SEO equity, or rewriting your storefront code. Within weeks, not months.
The Lift-and-Shift Strategy Preserves What Works
The lift-and-shift approach keeps your Next.js storefront intact while replacing only the backend. This strategy delivers three critical advantages over full replatforming.
Your customers see close to zero disruption. The storefront they know—the navigation, the checkout flow, the mobile experience—remains mostly unchanged. No retraining for support teams. No updated documentation.
Your frontend investment stays protected. Every hour spent on performance optimization, accessibility compliance, and conversion rate improvements carries forward. Your SEO equity—URL structures, meta tags, Core Web Vitals scores—transfers completely.
Your timeline shrinks dramatically. Teams report 50-70% faster migrations compared to full replatforming. A lift-and-shift typically completes in 10-16 weeks versus 8-12 months for building everything from scratch.
The key insight: headless architecture treats the backend as a replaceable component. Your Next.js storefront doesn’t care what generates the API responses—it only cares that the responses arrive in the expected format.
Step 1: Map Backend Features to Spree 5 Native Capabilities
Before writing a single line of migration code, audit your current backend’s feature usage. Document every capability your storefront actually consumes, then map each one to Spree 5’s native functionality.
Products and Catalog Management
Spree 5 handles unlimited products with variants, options, and properties out of the box. The platform supports complex catalog structures including configurable products, bundles, and digital goods with file attachments and download limits.
The new Automatic Taxons feature enables rules-based category assignment—products automatically appear in the right collections based on properties, tags, or custom criteria. This eliminates manual categorization that plagues most legacy platforms.
For custom product data, Spree 5.2 introduced the Metafields system for extending any model without database migrations. Add structured data to products, variants, orders, or customers through the admin interface. Your frontend queries this data through the standard API—no custom endpoints required.
Pricing, Promotions, and Discounts
Most legacy platforms require plugins or custom code for sophisticated promotions. Spree 5 includes a robust promotion engine with condition-based rules as a core feature.
The promotion system supports percentage and fixed discounts, buy-X-get-Y offers, tiered pricing, and customer segment-specific deals. Coupon codes can be generated in batches with CSV export for marketing campaigns. Multi-currency support means promotions respect regional pricing automatically.
Native gift card functionality arrived in Spree 5.1 with bulk generation, custom prefixes, balance tracking, and expiration management. If your current backend requires a third-party gift card service, this capability alone can eliminate an integration point and its associated fees.
Checkout and Payments
The customizable checkout flow in Spree 5 adapts to your business requirements. Enable or disable guest checkout, add custom steps, or streamline the process for returning customers.
Payment processing integrates natively with Stripe for card payments plus Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Link for quick checkout. The Adyen integration handles global payment methods including local options across 30+ countries. Offsite payment support covers buy-now-pay-later services and bank redirects.
For marketplaces, Stripe Connect integration enables automatic payment splitting and vendor payouts without custom development.
Orders and Fulfillment
The order management system handles the complete lifecycle: creation, payment capture, fulfillment, shipping, and returns. Improved refunds and returns workflows support partial returns, full returns, and exchanges with proper inventory adjustment.
Multi-location inventory tracking includes stock movements and transfers between warehouses. For dropshipping models, automatic order splitting routes items to the appropriate vendor for fulfillment.
The Mapping Exercise
Create a spreadsheet with four columns: Current Feature, Usage Frequency, Spree 5 Equivalent, and Migration Notes. For each feature your storefront uses, identify whether Spree 5 handles it natively, through an official extension, or requires custom development.
The goal: maximize native Spree capabilities. Every custom feature you don’t build is a feature you don’t maintain, test, or upgrade.
Step 2: Leverage Spree 5’s Full Platform Capabilities
With feature mapping complete, configure Spree 5 to match your business model. The platform’s architecture supports diverse commerce scenarios without requiring custom development.
Multi-Store Operations
Running multiple brands or regional storefronts? The multi-store ecommerce capability manages them from a single admin panel. Each store gets its own domain, catalog (shared or isolated), payment integrations, shipping configurations, and checkout customizations.
Your Next.js storefront connects to the appropriate store context through the API. A single codebase can power multiple storefronts by passing the store identifier with each request.
Marketplace and Multi-Vendor Models
For marketplace operators, the multi-vendor marketplace module adds vendor onboarding, catalog curation, marketplace order splitting and vendor order and shipment tracking sync. Vendors manage their own products and inventory while you control the overall marketplace experience.
Stripe Connect integration handles the complex payment flows—customer pays once, funds split automatically between marketplace and vendors based on configured commission rates.
B2B Commerce Requirements
Business-to-business operations require capabilities most consumer platforms lack. B2B commerce features include customizable signup forms for business verification, organization hierarchies with role-based access, customer segmentation with segment-specific pricing, request-for-quote workflows, and password-protected storefronts for wholesale-only access.
The customer segmentation system powers all B2B pricing scenarios: volume discounts, contract pricing, tiered pricing by customer level, and regional pricing variations.
International and Multi-Currency
Global commerce requires more than currency conversion. Spree 5’s multi-currency and multi-language support handles localized pricing (not just converted), region-specific payment methods, local tax calculations, and translated content.
Configure currency-based promotion rules so your European customers see Euro prices and region-appropriate discounts without maintaining separate storefronts.
💰 The Business Impact Justifies the Investment
Modernizing your backend isn’t a technical vanity project. The impact hits your bottom line directly.
Security Risk Decreases Immediately
Outdated commerce platforms create liability. The average data breach costs $4.88 million globally. PCI-DSS 4.0 requirements took effect in 2025 with 51 new controls—legacy platforms often can’t comply without major modifications.
Spree 5 runs on current Ruby on Rails with regular security updates. Cloud-native deployment means security patches apply without scheduled maintenance windows. Modern authentication (OAuth 2.0, MFA support) protects customer accounts.
Performance Improvements Convert to Revenue
Speed directly impacts sales. A one-second delay in page load causes 7% conversion drop. Sites loading in one second convert 2.5x higher than sites loading in five seconds.
Modern API architecture reduces response times. The Storefront API designed for headless frontends returns only requested data through sparse fieldsets and includes—no wasted bytes transferring unused information.
Caching improves at every layer. CDN caching for static assets. API response caching in your Next.js backend-for-frontend. Spree’s database query optimization through includes prevents N+1 query problems.
Innovation Velocity Accelerates
When backend changes require months of work, features don’t ship. When backend changes require days, experimentation becomes possible.
Teams on modern commerce platforms report 50% reduction in time to launch new experiences and 25% faster time-to-market for features. Implementations that took six months on legacy systems complete in weeks.
The clean upgrade path in Spree 5 means you’re not locked to today’s capabilities. New features arrive through standard updates. Your customizations survive upgrades because they follow documented extension patterns rather than core modifications.
Total Cost of Ownership Drops
Legacy platforms accumulate hidden costs: specialized developers who understand decade-old codebases, infrastructure sized for inefficient architectures, plugin license fees for capabilities that should be standard.
Open-source Spree eliminates per-transaction fees and seat-based licensing. Modern Ruby on Rails runs efficiently on standard infrastructure. The active contributor community means answers exist for common problems.
Teams report 50% reduction in maintenance costs and 34% less time spent on upgrades and bug fixes. Those hours redirect to features that grow revenue instead of maintenance that preserves status quo.
Next Steps
Your Next.js storefront represents significant investment—design iterations, performance optimization, conversion improvements accumulated over years. A lift-and-shift to Spree 5 protects that investment while eliminating the backend that’s holding you back.
The Spree 5 open-source eCommerce platform handles your commerce operations. Best-of-breed integrations handle specialized functions. Your frontend stays exactly as your customers know it.
Faster pages. Secure infrastructure. Clean upgrade paths. Features that ship in weeks instead of months. Revenue impact you can measure.
Ready to start? Explore the Spree 5 documentation or contact the Spree team to discuss your migration strategy.
