Chemist Warehouse

How we delivered zero disruption to organic revenue during an 18-month Commercetools transformation, then drove sustained growth across a three-brand pharmacy network.

• Zero major technical issues during go-live
• Maintained keyword rankings throughout transition
• 500+ store locations optimised for local search
• Now managing SEO across Chemist Warehouse, Amcal, and Discount Drug Stores

Chemist Warehouse is Australia's leading pharmacy retailer, operating alongside sister brands Amcal and Discount Drug Stores. 

Together, they represent one of the largest pharmacy networks in the country with over 500 store locations.

Chemist Warehouse was undertaking one of Australia's largest e-commerce platform migrations, an 18-month transition from legacy systems to a modern composable commerce stack built on Commercetools. The risk was significant: any disruption to organic search could directly impact revenue across hundreds of product categories and thousands of SKUs.

After the migration, the challenge evolved. Both Amcal and Discount Drug Stores had experienced visibility losses during previous platform changes and needed foundational rebuilding. The group required a unified SEO strategy that could drive growth across three distinct brands with different market positioning.

The new Chemist Warehouse platform runs on a best-in-class composable commerce architecture:

• Commercetools: headless commerce engine
• Algolia: search and product discovery
• Contentful: content management
• Akeneo: product information management
• Netlify: frontend hosting
• Okta/Auth0: identity and security

Each component required specific SEO consideration: how Algolia-powered search pages would be crawled and indexed, how Contentful content would render for search engines, how the headless frontend would handle technical fundamentals like canonicals, hreflang, and structured data. Our role was ensuring the SEO layer worked seamlessly across all components.

We embedded SEO into every stage of the platform build, architecture planning, URL structure, content migration, staging environment testing, and intensive post-launch monitoring. The focus was risk elimination: ensuring rankings held through the transition while building technical foundations for future growth.

With migration complete, we shifted to aggressive optimisation. 

For Chemist Warehouse, this meant category content development, internal linking improvements, local landing pages targeting suburb-level searches, and GBP optimisation across 500+ locations. 

For Amcal and Discount Drug Stores, we're running technical remediation, keyword mapping, and building local search presence from stronger foundations.
 

With Google's AI Mode now live in Australia and ChatGPT referral traffic already appearing in Chemist Warehouse's revenue breakdown, we're positioning the brand for the next evolution of search.

Current state

Chemist Warehouse is well-positioned for AI-driven discovery. Strong brand visibility means AI systems already reference CW in pharmacy-related queries, and the server-side rendered Commercetools architecture ensures AI crawlers can access and understand content effectively.

What we're doing

We're tracking ChatGPT as a distinct traffic and revenue source, monitoring Google AI Mode impact as adoption grows, and identifying long-tail content opportunities where AI search excels. Queries like "which perfume for my grandma" where conversational, helpful content wins. We're also exploring AI Max (paid placements within AI answers) as a potential channel.

This is strategic positioning rather than reactive optimisation. AI search is still emerging, but the brands that build for it now will capture value as adoption scales

This project required close collaboration across multiple specialist partners. Convert Digital led the platform build, delivering a custom frontend, bespoke checkout, and patient profile system. We embedded directly into this ecosystem, working alongside Convert's development team and Chemist Warehouse's internal stakeholders to ensure SEO requirements were built into every technical decision.

Weekly syncs with both partners meant issues were caught in development rather than after go-live. The composable architecture created complexity — more moving parts means more opportunities for technical SEO to fall through the gaps between systems. By maintaining direct relationships with both the platform partner and internal teams from project inception, we prevented the typical post-migration traffic drops that plague enterprise e-commerce transitions.

Large-scale Commercetools migrations fail when SEO is treated as an afterthought. Composable architecture means more moving parts and more opportunities for technical SEO to fall through the gaps between systems.

We avoided the typical post-migration traffic drops by:

• Embedding into the project from day one, not bolting on SEO at the end
• Maintaining direct relationships with Convert Digital and Chemist Warehouse's internal teams
• Treating SEO as infrastructure, not an add-on
• Catching issues in staging rather than after go-live

But migration success is just the starting point. The stable technical foundation now supports aggressive growth across all three pharmacy brands:

• Category content expansion replacing thin, automated descriptions
• Local search dominance across 500+ store locations
• Internal linking architecture connecting long-tail queries to commercial intent
• AI search readiness as discovery channels evolve

As search shifts toward AI-driven discovery, the brands building for that change now will win the future search battles.