European dealer migrations

The situation

Springfree sells through dealers, and in Europe those dealers ran their own storefronts. The UK, France and Switzerland sites sat on long-serving Joomla and OpenCart installs that had done honest work for years. The trouble was that each storefront was its own island, with separate hosting, separate templates and a separate checkout, in a region where a store often needs to work in more than one language. Keeping three unrelated stacks current took steady effort, and almost none of that effort showed up anywhere a customer could see it.

By this point I’d built an official Shopify Partner practice inside goba. We knew the platform well after years of running Springfree’s own stores on it. What we hadn’t proven yet was that we could deliver the same work for clients, in markets an ocean away. These migrations were where we’d find out.

What I did

I ran each migration as a proper client engagement, with its own scope, build and cutover, rather than one big bang across the region. We moved catalogs, content and domains onto Shopify, set up the languages each market needed, and kept every dealer on their own domain so customers never had to relearn where the store lives. Multilingual and multi-domain sounds simple when you say it out loud. In practice it’s redirect maps, translation passes and a long list of small decisions about which market gets which behaviour. I stayed close enough to the work to make those calls quickly, and to do the last pass myself before each site went live.

What changed

All three markets now run on Shopify, and the Joomla and OpenCart installs are retired along with their separate hosting and separate upkeep. Dealers manage products, content and orders on one platform, in their own languages, on their own domains. Supporting them no longer takes three unrelated skill sets.

The migrations did their bigger job too. They proved the Partner practice could deliver for external clients, and we’ve since shipped client sites across North America and Australia. The practice needed a first project that showed it was real, and this was it.