Case Study: Beyond Retro achieves lightning-fast search and 30% infrastructure savings with Algolia's Magento plugin

How Beyond Retro Improved Its Ecommerce Site with Algolia’s Magento Plugin

Beyond Retro is a London-founded vintage clothing retailer operating a Magento-powered global site with more than 35,000 unique, one-of-a-kind items. The constantly changing catalogue—items photographed and removed individually—made search and category filtering slow and unreliable on Magento, causing poor customer experience and performance issues on a limited infrastructure budget.

Beyond Retro replaced Magento’s search with Algolia’s Magento plugin, a straightforward one-month integration, and used it as a catalogue replacement. The result: search queries average ~60 ms, average server response time fell from 0.9 to 0.55 seconds, load spikes disappeared, Magento category cache invalidation was no longer needed, and infrastructure costs dropped by about 30%.

Beyond Retro

Jascha McDonald

Software Developer and Application Architect