SuiteCommerce to Shopify

The situation

Springfree makes premium trampolines, and an average order runs around US$1,500. When someone’s about to spend that kind of money on their backyard, the site itself is part of what they’re judging.

In my Web Manager years the site ran on NetSuite SuiteCommerce, which kept the catalogue and order flow close to the ERP. That setup served the business well for a long time. As direct-to-consumer growth picked up, though, we needed faster pages and a front end we could change quickly, so it made sense to split the storefront from the system of record.

What I did

I planned and led the move to Shopify. NetSuite stayed the system of record, Shopify took over the storefront, and Celigo moved orders, inventory, and customers between the two. I ran the platform evaluation, owned the integration design, and rebuilt the front end with performance as a launch requirement, since faster pages were a big part of why we were moving in the first place.

Most of the real work in a re-platform is risk management. Revenue can’t pause while you rebuild, so I put as much care into the sequencing, the data migration and the cutover plan as into anything a customer would ever see.

The architecture question came back after launch, too. The stack later went headless, and after living with that for a while I made the call to bring the storefront back to native Shopify Plus. That took a lot of moving parts out of the picture, and it saves six figures a year.

What changed

Page speed improved 83% and conversion rose 46%. The re-platformed stack then carried a record 2020 holiday season, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday reaching up to 146% over the prior year’s Q4. A quarter like that takes the whole company, so I won’t claim it as mine. The platform’s job was to hold up and keep converting through the busiest weeks of the year, and it did.

What I like most in hindsight is that it lasted. Springfree still sells on Shopify, and the platform decisions from this era are the ones the business runs on today. If I had to pick one call from the whole migration, it’s bringing the storefront back from headless to native. Taking architecture out turned out to be the better product decision.