Three Markets, One Platform, 50% More Efficiency: Ooka's Commerce Rebuild with Codilar

Ooka had cracked something the hookah industry hadn't seen before, a smart, charcoal-free device that heated premium shisha pods in under five minutes. The GCC loved it. So did the States. Germany was coming on board. The community was growing, the orders were coming in, and the ambition was clear.

The problem was everything happening behind the scenes. The platform was struggling to keep up with the pace of the business. Managing a growing catalog of devices, pods, kits, and accessories was becoming increasingly manual. Subscriptions couldn't be handled reliably. Discounts clashed at checkout, costing conversions on a daily basis. Shipping across three different markets had no unified logic. And updating the storefront experience across regions required far more effort than it should have. The product was ready for the world. The infrastructure wasn't.

Ooka needed more than a development team. They needed a partner who could look at the full picture, understand where the gaps were, and build something that wouldn't just solve today's problems but hold up as the business continued to grow.

That's what brought them to Codilar. As an Adobe Gold Solution Partner with deep expertise in commerce architecture, Codilar had the right combination of platform knowledge and strategic thinking to take this on. The goal wasn't a quick fix. It was a proper rebuild, done right, on Adobe Commerce Cloud.

Before anything else could be solved, the foundation needed attention. Codilar made the call to move Ooka onto a headless hybrid architecture. Magento would power the backend, handling all commerce logic, inventory, orders, and integrations. Adobe Experience Manager would take the front, managing content delivery across all three regional storefronts. The two layers would work together but operate independently, which meant the marketing team could move at their speed and the engineering team could move at theirs, without either getting in the other's way. This single architectural decision changed what was possible for everything else that followed.

Anyone who has tried to manage a product range like Ooka's knows how quickly it can spiral. Devices come in configurations. Pods have flavors, sizes, and regional variants. Kits bundle multiple items. Accessories sit across categories. Without a catalog structure designed for this kind of complexity, every update becomes a risk.

Codilar rebuilt the catalog architecture to reflect how Ooka's products actually work. Variants behaved the way they were supposed to. Configurations were scalable. The team could make changes without worrying about something breaking downstream. And for customers, browsing finally felt intuitive.

For a brand putting this much effort into the product and the experience, checkout was a weak link. The problem ran deeper than a design issue. Ooka's discount logic was fundamentally broken. Loyalty rewards, promotional codes, and regional pricing couldn't coexist without creating conflicts that confused customers and killed conversions. People were getting to the final step and abandoning because the numbers didn't add up.

Codilar rebuilt the discount logic layer entirely, engineering a system where multiple discount types could stack cleanly without overriding each other. Checkout became consistent and predictable. At the same time, a proper subscription infrastructure was put in place, giving customers the option to set up recurring purchases easily and giving Ooka a steadier, more dependable revenue stream.

The operational side of Ooka's business was held together by too many manual processes and too many disconnected systems. Inventory updates were slow. Order management lacked visibility. And running three different regional storefronts meant shipping logic was being figured out separately for each market, which added time, effort, and room for error at every step.

Codilar integrated Ooka's ERP systems directly into the platform, creating a real-time connection between inventory, orders, and the storefront. Middleware was developed to bring GCC, US, and Germany shipping workflows under one roof. What had previously required multiple people and multiple systems to manage could now be handled centrally, automatically, and accurately.

Ooka already had something most brands spend years trying to build: a loyal customer base that genuinely cared about the product. The opportunity was to make that loyalty work harder.

Codilar built a loyalty and referral engine integrated natively into the commerce platform. Customers could earn points, redeem rewards, and refer friends, all within the natural flow of the shopping experience. Nothing felt forced or tacked on. Meanwhile, cWarmer - an in-house Codilar tech performance enhancer was deployed to improve backend performance and reduce load times, and AEM gave the team the tools to deliver personalised content to each regional audience without starting from scratch every time. The platform wasn't just selling anymore. It was building something longer-lasting.