In 2022, Shoptiques, the online marketplace serving independent retail boutiques across the US since 2011, was stagnating. In an attempt to turn around the marketplace’s declining sales, we made a hail-mary decision, and what followed was nothing short of remarkable.
Let’s set the stage…
It’s 2022, and Shoptiques is a homegrown, custom-built ecommerce marketplace that dropships orders from hundreds of real brick-and-mortar boutiques across the US. Nearly all the code for the site had been written by an internal team of engineers who worked on it between 2011 and 2017. For the next five years, the site was maintained by a skeleton crew, splitting their time between maintaining an aging monolithic codebase and attempting to drive new visitors to the site.
Year after year, sales through the site steadily dropped. Despite the team’s best efforts, Shoptiques was experiencing a negative cycle we couldn’t break out of. Issues compounded, and in 2022, the site was plagued with technical issues, a poor user experience, and discouraged merchants.
In one of our many meetings discussing the future of the site, we addressed a sacred cow. Shoptiques had always been a marketplace business, but perhaps it was time to give up on building marketplace tech. We are a tech company, and while we technically could build an ecommerce marketplace, maybe it was time to reevaluate whether this was the best use of our small team’s time, given the markedly different ecommerce landscape in 2022 vs 2012. We had enough on our plates, and with so many great ecommerce software options on the market, we decided that, as much as possible, we should be buying, rather than building, the tech behind Shoptiques.
We understood that the value we had built up in Shoptiques lay in its community of merchants we’d grown close with and the many thousands of shoppers who frequented our site. It was in the 70,000 products from trendy and heritage brands in the Shoptiques catalog and the domain and SEO reputation we’d built up in Google over the previous decade. None of Shoptiques’ stakeholders cared whether our technology was built by us or someone else as long as it worked well for their needs.
And so we made the call. We’d re-platform a 10-year-old code base to a more modern service provider, a company that specializes in building ecommerce tech.
At a high level, our goals with this switch were:
- Improve the site’s user experience and our team’s ability to merchandise the site through better and more diverse admin tools
- Turn around the declining sales
- Reduce the cost of maintaining Shoptiques by eliminating servers needed to host and run a custom-built platform
- Free up our engineers’ time to work on other things
Enter Shopify
While our team had some experience working with Shopify, we had no idea how we’d migrate the complexities of a dropship marketplace like Shoptiques onto their platform.
We started by mapping Shoptiques’ core features and hard requirements to Shopify’s feature set. We had to learn which use cases and workflows would be supported on Shopify. How much of the current website experience could be migrated? How much of the backend inventory and order management could Shopify handle for us?
After much research, we had our transition plan, and we got to work. Ultimately, we had to keep some of Shoptiques backend tools running, but the entire frontend, the storefront, would be built on Shopify, with the help of several apps from the Shopify app store. We built integrations to stream data between our backend and the Shopify storefront.
This hybrid approach gave us the best of both worlds; we could still support all the complexities of a dropship marketplace while benefiting from Shopify’s highly performant and user-friendly storefront tech.
We turned on the new Shoptiques website, powered by Shopify, in March 2023.
The Shopify effect
Website user experience
We noticed an immediate uplift in conversion rate. Nearly overnight, we went from around 0.5% or below to a 1-1.5% conversion rate, which confirmed to us just how hamstrung we’d been by technical issues and how effective Shopify’s platform was.
We bought an off-the-shelf Shopify theme for the site design and customized it to the Shoptiques brand. The site looked and worked great, thanks to our amazing design team and the beautiful theme it was built on. It was fast, reliable, and responsive on desktop and mobile, where the majority of our shoppers come from.
At any given time, there are about 70,000 products in stock on Shoptiques, so from the get-go, it was important for us to find the right tools and workflows for merchandising this catalog on our new Shopify-powered storefront. Matrixify and Boost Commerce are a couple of apps that helped us accelerate our merchandising capabilities. Matrixify gives us tools on the backend to bulk edit thousands of products, like editing tags or other attributes, setting statuses, marking products down, etc. On the website frontend, Boost Commerce provides highly customizable collection pages that support complex product filtering and search capabilities for our visitors.
With further tuning to our site design, merchandising, and marketing, we’ve since seen many weeks with conversion rates as high as 2.8%, a 5x improvement over the previous site! This conversion rate was completely unattainable on our previous site and attests to the great user experience we’ve been able to build on Shopify.
Better yet, we heard from long-time merchants on our platform who reached out to us and were excited about the new site. The improved user experience and increasing sales were getting merchants excited again to be part of the Shoptiques community. We noticed an uptick in product uploads.
Looking back on our project goals, the improvements we made to the user experience with Shopify were instrumental in helping us break out of our negative cycle.
Sales
In the first month of being on Shoptiques, while we did see a strong uptick in conversion rates, the migration was a full team effort, and our marketing efforts took a hit. March was a relatively flat month for Shoptiques. However, there were too many positive signs for this to deter us. Being on Shopify was already opening up more marketing opportunities for us, even if it took some time to implement them.
With technical issues behind us, we had a solid foundation for developing a marketing strategy that would have taken too much time and effort to implement otherwise.
We switched our email service provider to Klaviyo to benefit from their tight integration with Shopify. What previously required an engineer to manage the integration and all the customer data properties synced between our custom-built platform and our email service provider was now automatically done for us with Shopify and Klaviyo.
We took advantage of the automated product feeds syncing to Google and Facebook. Having automated, reliable, and robust product feeds that don’t have to be endlessly monitored is a huge win and has opened the door for us to start marketing on Google and Facebook.
Throughout 2023 and into 2024, we found ourselves moving faster than ever before. We focused on building up our marketing capabilities across email and paid media on Google and Facebook. When the Holiday season came around in 2023, we really began to see our efforts pay off. We had a record season, beating all of our expectations, and for the first time in 6 years, we broke out of our cycle of negative GMV growth and crushed the previous year’s sales numbers.
And in 2024, sales are up 70% year over year. The migration to Shopify has been a big success in terms of sales.
Cost reduction
While we were able to shut down some of the legacy Shoptiques tech infrastructure and save some money here, we continue to rely on some of the original backend services for marketplace order management. Further, we haven’t shied away from investing in the Shopify ecosystem when we see opportunities to improve the site’s user experience or drive traffic. Overall, in terms of cost reduction, the migration hasn’t saved us as much money as we’d hoped, but it’s primarily because of the investments we continue to make to grow the site. There are certainly areas where we could cut costs, should the need arise.
Freed up engineering capacity
With fewer servers and less tech to maintain, our small engineering team has been instrumental in growth-oriented initiatives. We’ve been able to make customizations to the Shopify storefront themes we use, integrate with more external services, improve our SEO, and we’re now beginning to develop custom Shopify apps and integrations to automate workflows. Less time putting out server fires and more time working on growth initiatives has improved our team’s morale and led to meaningful contributions to our bottom line. For our small team, keeping the engineers working on revenue-generating activities as much as possible, instead of expenses like site maintenance, is critical to continue growing the business.
Summing it up
Over the last year, Shoptiques has transformed from a struggling custom-built ecommerce platform to a thriving marketplace. It’s a case study for other ecommerce businesses looking to switch to Shopify, and, more generally, it offers an important lesson on when to buy vs. build technology. By migrating to Shopify, we significantly enhanced our user experience, streamlined operations, and revitalized sales, achieving nearly a 5x improvement in conversion rates and a 70% increase in year-over-year sales.
By switching to Shopify, Shoptiques not only revitalized its marketplace but also re-energized its merchant community and internal team. For businesses facing similar hurdles, this case study is a testament to the transformative impact of re-platforming and the potential benefits of partnering with industry-leading technology providers. Let Shoptiques’ success inspire you to explore how our managed ecommerce services can help unlock new growth opportunities for your business.
