Ecommerce

Darcy Clothing

Moving a specialist clothes retailer from Magento to Shopify to reduce costs and increase flexibility.

The client

A well-established reseller of period clothes used extensively by film, television and theatre companies as well as individuals.

The brief

Move the site from Magento to Shopify while retaining all the product and customer information.

The outcome

Significant ongoing cost reductions for the client, much better integration with their other systems and a marked increase in turnover - not bad!

What we did

The reason the client got in touch with us was because they were facing a large upgrade cost for their existing Magento-based system and were looking at alternatives. Initially they had discounted Shopify as it didn’t offer the same level of functionality with product variants as Magento, but once a workaround had been developed for this, it was obvious that Shopify was the way to go.

Migration
Once the decision had been made, the main issue was getting the product data, images and sectionalisation out of Magento and into Shopify, which was not as straightforward as it sounds. We didn’t have full access to the Magento back-end so had to rely on text files of data which took a long time to decipher! Once this was done, the product data and images were copied over to Shopify via its API and other data was mapped to its Shopify equivalent.

A mix of apps and custom code
After the data was in, we then had to add in the functionality required by the client, which was mostly done with Shopify apps but also extra custom code to bridge gaps. For example the XERO integration was mostly done via an app, but there was an extra piece of data which needed to be added to XERO for certain types of orders which had to be done by linking the Shopify API with the XERO API.

A smooth transition
Once all the functionality was in place and the theme had been modified to the client’s taste, we were able to switch over from the old site. However because the old site had been running for several years, there was value in all its URLs, so these needed to be mapped to their Shopify equivalents. In order to do this, we generated a list of mappings and then added them all as redirects via the Shopify API.