For many eCommerce brands, building a custom platform is an obvious choice because it offers flexibility and full control. However, after the initial stage, once the business starts growing, the custom platform starts revealing its limitations.
New feature additions seem impossible, development team interventions increase, and so do maintenance costs. Migrating from custom platforms to Shopify is easy.
In this blog, we share 8 custom eCommerce to Shopify migration cases of brands that successfully migrated and saw positive results.
8 custom eCommerce to Shopify migration cases
1. Bark
(Pets / subscription)
The American pet brand, Bark, is popular for its monthly subscription BarkBox. Bark’s website was built on a custom platform. Over the years, the platform had accumulated custom, which created a lot of technical issues.
For example, their engineering team spent most of their time maintaining infrastructure and code for features that did not add value after a point. Every new launch felt tedious. They faced code freezes during high-traffic periods. This meant they missed out on opportunities to innovate.
How Shopify migration helped:
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Their conversion rate increased by 6% in the first month
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Their subscriptions grew by 8% during the holiday season
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Launched a Black Friday dog person quiz within a few weeks of migration
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Faster feature implementation
2. Parachute
(Bedding, bath, and home essentials)
Parachute is a Los Angeles-based DTC home essentials brand. The brand had a headless Shopify setup, built in 2019, to handle complex product variants. But overtime, it became a liability. As Shopify rolled out new features, they couldn't access them because they weren't using the platform as intended.
When Parachute built its own checkout system, their 14-person engineering team was suddenly on call 24/7 to fix it. New Shopify POS features for their retail stores were inaccessible. Unified inventory across channels was impossible.
How headless to Shopify migration helped:
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Removed custom development costs
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Unlocked BOPIS functionality
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Gave their store associates access to complete customer purchase history
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Increased AOV
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Saved $1M in annual cost
3. Skullcandy
(Lifestyle audio brand)
Another example of custom eCommerce to Shopify migration is Skullcandy, a brand that offers earphones, headphones, speakers, etc. Its previous custom platform could not keep pace with the brand's creative ambitions. Enhancing product pages, creating special brand moments, and adding new features became developer-heavy projects that took weeks and months.
The team spent more time monitoring the site than building new capabilities. The brand had to decide between pouring more resources into the aging infrastructure or migrating to a platform that could accelerate growth. Previous migrations to other platforms had taken nine months, hampering agility.
How migrating to Shopify helped:
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There was 45% holiday season revenue growth annually
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The custom platform migration to Shopify took 3 months
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The team got time to optimize the site for the holiday season
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The brand was able to run creative experiments instead of routine tasks
4. Murad
(Clinical skincare)
A 30-year-old skincare and beauty brand, Murad was set up on a custom built eCommerce platform. It has an outdated content management system that was completely separate from their eCommerce platform. Because of this, the team had to update product pages and site content across two different systems every time a change was needed.
Moreover, onboarding new team members was tedious. The custom integrations required long development timelines and a dependency on a small group of technical specialists. The marketing team had no autonomy to make basic site updates.
How custom eCommerce to Shopify migration helped the brand:
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After migration, the brand saw a 56% conversion rate
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The average order value increased by 17%
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Shopify's unified CMS and commerce layer eliminated the dual-system bottleneck
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The brand launched an AI-powered skincare quiz using plug-and-play apps
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The team gained full operational autonomy
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The brand was able to be more dynamic and agile
5. Westwing
(Premium design and living marketplace)
One of Europe’s leading design brands, Westwing was set up on a custom eCommerce platform for over a decade. While the custom platform gave the brand initial flexibility, it ended up becoming a complex infrastructure that required constant internal engineering involvement.
Expanding into a new country became an enormous task, the platform struggled to scale and innovate at the pace that the business demanded. That’s when Westwing decided to migrate to a SaaS-based platform that could meet all their needs.
How Shopify migration helped:
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The brand launched in 12 new markets
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They launched in a new market within 3 months
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The brand went headless on Shopify, separated their custom frontend from Shopify’s backend
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Shopify Markets helps Westwing to replicate the core components for a new country quickly
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The brand successfully transferred customer checkout data during migration
6. Superfeet
(Performance insoles, biomechanical comfort)
The sports and footwear brand, Superfeet’s website was built on a legacy custom infrastructure. The old platform required too much dependency on the development team, whether it was for content updates or campaign rollouts. Marketers had to wait for development teams to update pages.
The site failed to communicate Superfeet's evolved brand identity and product technology in an engaging way. International content couldn't be easily localized. The brand's digital experience lagged behind its physical reputation for innovation.
How Shopify helped Superfeet:
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Superfeet rebuilt their site architecture around athlete needs with an insole finder, product comparison tools, and fully localized global pages
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Everything is manageable by the marketing team without developer dependency
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The brand’s revenue increased by 19% in a year
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Customer sessions increased by 6%
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The marketing team now has speed to respond to market opportunities
7. Le Chameau
(Handcrafted boots)
This France-based heritage boots brand has a complex legacy platform. Even simple tasks, such as processing returns and exchanges for custom boot sizes were cumbersome and user-unfriendly. The team's ability to respond quickly to customer needs was limited by platform complexity.
Making any change required extensive developer involvement. Surfacing accurate data for marketing decisions was difficult. The platform's rigidity prevented the team from delivering the quality of customer experience the brand deserved.
How Shopify helped:
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The custom eCommerce to shopify migration was completed within five weeks
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The short migration timeline saved costs compared to longer timelines
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Le Chameau in-housed much of their development work, gained accurate data surfacing, and transformed the returns/exchange experience
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65% total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction
8. Tupperware
(Food storage and kitchenware)
Tupperware was built on a fragmented, multi-vendor stack. In 2024, the company’s ownership changed. The new owners had to encounter a web of custom integrations connecting Shopify to standalone systems for accounting, shipping, fulfillment, etc. All the processes operated in separate silos.
For instance, separate US and Canada stores meant duplicating every campaign. Custom payment integrations required manual reconciliation. To add any new tool, the brand had to vet it against the incompatible legacy system. This made the brand abandon initiatives or they had to spend months finding a solution.
How Shopify migration helped Tupperware:
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Time-to-market became weeks from months
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The brand eliminated the multi-vendor infrastructure
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The team was able to move from maintaining integrations to building new capabilities
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All their processes - finance, marketing, and operations work from a single system
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The brand has unified multi-country operations
What these custom eCommerce to Shopify migrations have in common
From skincare to electronics to footwear, many of these custom platform migrations have the same common themes. Here are some.
Maintaining custom eCommerce platforms is costly
A number of these brands were spending a significant amount of money, resources, and time in merely maintaining the platform rather than building competitive advantages. Maintenance for legacy, custom infrastructure was keeping the brands away from innovation.
Speed to market is the real competition
Many brands in these Shopify Plus enterprise case studies didn’t just cut costs, they also accelerated growth and expansion. For instance Westwing entered into more than 10 new countries within a short period. Shopify Plus allowed the brands speed - to test, to launch, to respond to customer and market needs.
Headless to Shopify Plus is an effective path
Many brands that had headless architecture realized that a unified native Shopify system provided more capabilities. That custom platforms are necessary for premium brands is not true. These Shopify Plus enterprise case studies show brands saved money after migrating.
Migration timelines are faster with Shopify
The process of migration often takes a long time. However, migrating to Shopify is much faster compared to other platforms. This means faster time to value, to new markets, and to growth.
Custom platforms become liability after a point
Brands often fail to understand the hidden costs of custom eCommerce platforms. Every brand in these custom to Shopify migration case studies thought they had a competitive edge with the custom platform. But the opposite was true for most of them.
How to migrate from custom eCommerce to Shopify Plus
If your website is currently on a custom platform, and you want to migrate to Shopify Plus, you’re already on the right path to higher performance, and growth. XgenTech can help you from audit to migration to post-migration monitoring and optimization.
