Duty-free e-commerce across New Zealand's airports, made dependable for Aelia Duty Free

At a glance

• Platform: Adobe Commerce (Magento)
• Engagement: support takeover from a previous partner, then ongoing development
• Running since: 2021, across all major New Zealand airport locations
• The hard parts: multi-currency and multi-language, duty and tax calculation, real-time inventory, automated sales exports into SAP

The problem

Aelia Duty Free — Lagardère Travel Retail’s duty-free brand — operates across New Zealand’s major airports, and its Magento e-commerce platform is core to customer engagement and online sales. Duty-free retail is unforgiving territory for e-commerce: multiple airport locations, multi-currency and multi-language shoppers, complex duty and tax calculations, and inventory that has to stay accurate in real time. Under a previous support arrangement the platform suffered from slow issue resolution, performance problems and unaddressed bugs, and Aelia needed a partner who could stabilise it — then keep improving it.

Our approach

Shakewell took over support and development of the Adobe Commerce (Magento) platform. The first phase was triage: stabilising the platform and clearing the long-standing technical issues affecting performance and user access. From there we moved to a structured, ongoing cadence — feature development aligned with business goals, performance optimisation, and proactive monitoring — alongside the integration work this kind of retail depends on: multi-currency and multi-language support, real-time inventory, duty and tax logic, and automated sales exports into SAP.

The outcome

The platform has operated across all major New Zealand airport locations since 2021, holding up robustly through peak tourist seasons and delivering a better experience for international travellers. Shakewell remains Aelia’s ongoing digital partner — behind new store sites, programmes and continuous enhancements — so internal teams can scale without disruption.

Why Adobe Commerce for this

Adobe Commerce earns its complexity when the trading rules are genuinely complex, and duty-free is the clearest example we work on: prices and tax vary by location and traveller, currency and language change per shopper, and inventory has to be right in real time across several airports. A hosted platform would fight most of that. Where a business does not have those constraints, we say so — the complexity is only worth carrying when you are actually using it.

What a takeover looks like

We did not start by rebuilding. The first phase was triage: stabilise the platform, then clear the backlog of long-standing issues affecting performance and access. Only once it was safe to change did feature work begin. That order matters — adding features to a platform nobody can safely deploy is how a struggling project becomes a stalled one.

Related services: E-commerce, Support and Maintenance