The brief
A DTC brand had outgrown their WooCommerce setup — plugin sprawl, slow mobile checkout, and subscription logic that couldn't handle their actual product bundles. They wanted Shopify's reliability without losing the custom storefront feel.
What we built
- Headless Shopify storefront in Next.js with full Liquid → JSX migration of every PDP and collection template.
- Custom subscription engine integrated with Shopify Subscriptions — handles their bundle/swap/skip rules that no off-the-shelf app supports.
- Edge-cached checkout with optimistic UI and 0.4s LCP on cellular.
- Headless CMS for editorial pages so the marketing team can ship campaign landing pages without engineering involvement.
How the migration ran
The replatform was sequenced to keep the old store live until the new one was proven. Inventory and subscriptions stayed authoritative in WooCommerce during the four-week run-down, with a real-time sync into Shopify so the data was warm when DNS flipped. SEO redirects were mapped one-to-one from every legacy URL — collection, product, and editorial — before launch, not after.
The subscription cutover was the riskiest part. Active subscribers were migrated in batches with a parallel-run window where Stripe handled the billing reconciliation between the old and new subscription engines until each subscriber's next renewal cleared on the new system.
Outcome
Mobile LCP dropped from 1.1s to 0.4s. Conversion rate on mobile lifted by 18% in the first quarter post-launch. The marketing team ships campaign pages without filing tickets. The brand's plugin spend went from five figures a year to zero.