Scalable Personalization in E-commerce Platforms: Balancing Customer Experience with System Complexity

The article analyzes the strategic transition of a large-scale gift card platform for e-commerce from a monolithic architecture to a microservices model. The relevance of the study is driven by the need for established technology organizations to overcome constraints related to technical debt, such as slow development cycles and high keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) operational costs, in order to improve system scalability, reliability, and business agility. The objective of the study is to examine contemporary architectural approaches, algorithmic concepts, and operational models that can contribute to achieving an optimal balance between system flexibility and fault tolerance. The results obtained indicate that a phased migration strategy aimed at creating a standardized, configurable purchase management page in standard retail platform (DPX) is the most effective. This approach not only improved core technical metrics—such as achieving 99.99% availability and a significant reduction in KTLO, equivalent to 2.5 full-time employees per year—but also equipped stakeholders with tools for rapid layout updates without writing code. The presented findings will be useful to chief technology officers, heads of engineering, and software architects managing the modernization of business-critical legacy systems.