Duty-free e-commerce across Australian and New Zealand 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 — Adelaide, Avalon and Cairns in Australia; Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin and Queenstown in New Zealand
• Architecture: one Adobe Commerce multi-website install serving two countries across two domains, with a store view per airport
• 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 airport stores across Australia and New Zealand, from Adelaide, Avalon and Cairns to Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin and Queenstown, 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 Aelia’s Australian and New Zealand airport stores since 2021, holding up robustly through peak travel 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. It is also the work behind our e-commerce development for New Zealand retailers, and the reason we can talk about trans-Tasman commerce from delivery rather than theory: two tax regimes, two freight networks and one inventory truth is exactly this platform’s problem, at a less forgiving scale than most retailers face.

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 country, location and traveller, currency and language change per shopper, and inventory has to be right in real time across seven airports in two countries. One catalogue, two tax regimes, two currencies, seven store views — that is the shape of the problem, and it is why the platform is scoped as multi-website rather than duplicated per market. 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

Industry: E-commerce & Retail