La Casa de las Carcasas started as a single kiosk in a Madrid shopping centre. Twelve years on, the Spanish accessories retailer runs more than 1,000 stores across 13 countries, with distribution centres in Spain, Chile, and Mexico, and calls itself Europe’s largest specialist chain for mobile accessories.
That scale had outgrown the technology behind it. By the time Fares Kameli, the company’s chief information officer, set out to replace it, the business was running 15 separate PrestaShop installations by hand. He rebuilt the whole operation on Shopify, not as an ecommerce migration, but as a single piece of infrastructure spanning ecommerce, loyalty, and in-store retail.
- Increased the conversion rate in Spain by around 71%.
- Won three Spanish ecommerce industry awards in a single year for its use of AI.
The challenge: 15 disconnected stores holding growth back
La Casa de las Carcasas ran its main storefront across five domains, plus separate PrestaShop installations for its in-store kiosks, its personalisation sub-brand, and two smaller brands: 15 set-ups in total. Nearly all of it ran on manual work.
“Fifteen customised PrestaShop installations, with their own modules and everything else, that was unmanageable for a technical team, and even harder for an operations team,” Kameli said. The team responsible for all of it numbered 11 people, later growing to 12, without the capacity to do much beyond keep the sites running.
Kameli had ruled Shopify out once already. Before Hydrogen and Oxygen matured, the platform’s URL structure and product categorisation could not support a catalogue of that size without damaging search rankings. “The infrastructure we had was unsustainable,” he said, and the gap between what the business needed and what its systems could do kept widening.
The solution: an AI-native infrastructure project
A conversation with a Shopify account executive Kameli had worked with before changed his view. Shopify’s roadmap had caught up on headless commerce and, more importantly to Kameli, on AI. He had been running generative AI workflows inside the business since 2021, years before most retailers started experimenting with it. “When I saw Shopify’s product roadmap built around AI development, I knew that was the place to be,” he said.
This isn’t an ecommerce project. It’s an infrastructure project.
The project that followed was Shopify’s first multi-site, multi-domain headless build of its kind, a 17-month build with 13 months dedicated specifically to ecommerce. It connects Plytix, Shopify POS, and a set of regional marketplace connectors covering Amazon, Mercado Libre, and Falabella into a single product catalogue. Shopify Flow now orchestrates international, multi-domain billing, generates product recommendations, and builds dynamic collection pages from the underlying data. “Billing across an international, multi-domain setup either goes through Flow, or it doesn’t go out at all,” Kameli said. Shopify Markets, paired with Flow, handles the multi-currency, multi-market pricing combinations that would otherwise be unworkable at this scale.
The same infrastructure runs two AI workflows built in-house. The first turns a supplier delivery note and a single product photo into a complete product card: specifications, translated listings for every market, and marketplace-specific fields, orchestrated through Python and PHP scripts and n8n. The second automates the mockups behind the retailer’s personalised phone cases, a job that used to be done by hand for every one of 14,300 case models. Built with Shopify partner Zakeke, whose platform the retailer pushed to extend for exactly this kind of scale, the workflow now generates and corrects those mockups automatically before anything reaches a human reviewer.
The result: automated storefronts and rising conversion
The team running the ecommerce operation changed shape and became smaller, while the business itself doubled in size. It now manages 12 storefronts and more than 20 marketplaces that update automatically, work that used to consume most of the week. “The other half of their time now goes to reviewing what the AI produces and learning the business, because the AI doesn’t know the business yet,” Kameli said.
Conversion in Spain has risen by around 71% since the move. Scroll depth on product pages fell by roughly half, to 52%, and average time on page dropped from close to 4 minutes to 2 minutes and 20 seconds. “Shopify’s checkout is incredible,” Kameli said. Three weeks after launching in France, the business recorded a 4.53% increase in organic traffic, with conversion improving by 47.2% in the first month.
La Casa de las Carcasas won three Spanish ecommerce industry awards in a single year, for its operational use of AI, its use of marketplaces, and its use of generative AI. Kameli credits the wins to focus rather than flash. The company is now piloting in-store pickup and same-day shipping across European stores for the coming peak season, with Shopify POS and Flow handling staff notifications directly, no separate interface required.
We’ve won every award we’ve gone for this year, because we focus on operations, not on making things look pretty.