How Pilgrim Scaled to 1,500 Orders per Minute on Shopify

Introduction

Pilgrim launched in 2019 as an online-first brand offering vegan, sulfate-free and paraben-free beauty essentials. They saw surges of 30x website users during tri-annual flash sales, only to face crashes on Adobe Commerce. That meant lost revenue, frustrated shoppers, and limited data to refine promotions. When traffic hit peak, the legacy checkout would throttle—blocking growth and causing downtime at critical moments.

The Scalability Challenge

Every few months, Pilgrim’s flash events brought floods of visitors, but their headless Magento site buckled under load. Conversion data was buried in generic dashboards. Rate-limit errors on a third-party checkout meant transactions slowed exactly when demand spiked. Interrupted checkouts frustrated customers and limited high-value insights on coupon attribution or inventory performance.

Migrating to Shopify for Speed and Reliability

Pilgrim evaluated platforms, then chose Shopify’s cloud-native infrastructure. The switch unlocked unlimited scale, native checkout without rate limits, and rich analytics. Within weeks, they saw consistent uptime and faster load times. Shopify Flow automated fraud screening, order routing to 3PLs, and segment-based marketing triggers. Checkout UI extensions let Pilgrim inject coupon prompts, optional gift adds, and pincode verification—all in a single page experience.

Record-Breaking Flash Sales

On Shopify, Pilgrim hit a record 1,556 orders per minute in August, beating their April peak by 26%. Conversions climbed to 22.4% during those flash events. Site visits jumped 10x overall, and revenue doubled year-on-year. By removing infrastructure bottlenecks, teams now focus on campaign creativity rather than server patches or manual order checks.

Key Insights Gained

Moving to Shopify gave Pilgrim real-time dashboards, API calls that never stalled, and extensibility to build private apps for cash-on-delivery fee collection. Multistore automation in Flow means they can spin up region-specific sales pages, and Functions let them apply discount math at checkout without performance hits.

Conclusion

Pilgrim’s shift from Adobe Commerce to Shopify transformed flash sale chaos into predictable, scalable performance. They now handle thousands of concurrent orders with ease, unlock deeper analytics for targeted growth, and keep shoppers excited with limited-time offers that never crash.