by Fatema Mulla
thelabwarehouse.com specialise in lab and scientific equipment, selling mostly to businesses all over the world. With decades of experience in selling scientific consumables, they recently went through a replatforming project to move their online store from Magento to Shopify.
We worked with them to help migrate their site from one platform to another, ensuring that the transition process ran as smoothly as possible.
Issues With Magento
Why did you decide to move away from Magento 1?
We decided to move away from Magento 1 as it was reaching the end of it’s life and the cost and complexity of moving to Magento 2 was prohibitive for us.
thelabwarehouse.com were experiencing a number of issues with their Magento site - including many technical glitches and a lack of reliability. They also thought it would be a good time to replatform as Magento 1 is nearing its end of life, and they were not keen on moving to Magento 2 due to the high cost and complexity involved.
The team decided to move away from Magento entirely, and agreed that moving to a new platform would be the best option for the store. After research and careful consideration, they decided on Shopify as their new platform.
Reason for Choosing Shopify
Why was Shopify your platform of choice? What is it you like about Shopify - what does it provide you with that other platforms can’t?
“After researching the market Statement were recommended to us. We were impressed with the cost and functionality offered by Shopify and the can do attitude of the Statement Team.
For us a hosted platform like Shopify is a real bonus as it removes all the administrative overhead we had with Magento. Monthly costs are also very reasonable when compared to other platforms.”
After consulting with us regarding their replatform project, thelabwarehouse.com were impressed with the functionality and features that Shopify could provide them with, and found it a much more cost effective option than their previous store.
They also liked that they wouldn’t have any maintenance overhead like they had experienced on Magento, so would no longer need to spend large amounts of time on maintenance tasks.
With Shopify being their platform of choice, thelabwarehouse.com then approached us to begin their migration process.
Challenges of the Migration
thelabwarehouse.com have over 14k products on their site, and their store functions as both an online eCommerce store as well as a product catalogue.
With such a large inventory, migrating products from one platform to another could have been a challenge. However, we worked to ensure that the migration process ran smoothly and that all products and spec documents that came with each product were moved over to the new site easily. We used Excelify - an eCommerce plugin that allows you to mass migrate products from one platform to another - to make this process simple and easy.
The company also has a very specific structure that they required. They wanted the new site to mirror the category levels they had on their Magento site, which meant implementing deep, multi level category structures. This was facilitated using an app - BTP categories - which enabled us to help and implement the required category levels on the new Shopify site.
They also have a specific tiered pricing model due to their range of different products, which had to implemented through a custom built app we created for them. The app was instrumental in enabling the brand to offer the specific tiered pricing model to their customers for the various products they offered.
Post Migration Benefits
What improvements have you seen after replatforming?
We have seen an immediate jump in our SEO rankings and a big increase in order conversions. I put the increase in conversions down to the very simple checkout process that Shopify offers our customers. We have seen our total order numbers almost double in the 6 months since we moved onto the Shopify platform.
We had our best ever order day recently and are now regularly receiving double the level of orders that we used to get on our old site!
thelabwarehouse.com have seen many improvements since moving from Magento to Shopify - and even had their best ever order day recently! An increase in conversions, immediate jumps in SEO and doubled order numbers are just some of the main benefits the company has seen.
Summary
thelabwarehouse.com have successfully managed to replatform their store from Magento 1 to Shopify, and are seeing incredible benefits as a result. They now have a store on a stable, reliable platform, and are receiving more orders than they ever have before.
If you want to know more about how Statement can help you with your replatform project, just get in touch with our friendly team and we’ll be happy to help.
