Magento vs. Shopify: How we solved migration, multi-channel and bundles for Shape Republic

Anyone who hangs around Instagram's most famous German influencers these days and is concerned with the topic of fitness and weight loss will most likely have already noticed the company Shape Republic.

Founded in 2017 and set up together with fitness influencer Sophia Thiel, the company sees itself as a platform for fulfilling fitness and nutrition goals. The range therefore includes not only fitness programs, but also products such as shakes, energy bars, nutrient boosters, planners and much more.

Shape Republic, which emerged from the ProSiebenSat1 Group, approached us with the desire to create a Shopify store that meets all requirements for functionality and design and harmonizes with other systems such as plentymarkets, Emarsys and odc. No sooner said than done.

How this project was realized, what challenges there were and why the work for Shape Republic was sometimes time-critical, we present to you in the next paragraphs.

The challenge and implementation

When the Shape Republic team approached us, there were several challenges that needed to be solved. Time pressure, multi-channel, the migration from Magento to Shopify and the desire for a bundle solution were the main tasks.

Strict scheduling

If there was one problem hanging over us like a sword of Damocles, it was definitely time. From the beginning, there was a fixed date when the new store would have to go live and this had a simple reason: at that time, the store was running on a license model basis and the previous store service provider terminated the contract with Shape Republic. We knew when the old online store would be shut down and we had to set this fixed date as the launch date so that the website and store would continue to exist without any problems to the outside world. We had a total of three months from kickoff to implementation to migrate products, customer data, CRM infrastructure and all processes.

So every single link in this project had to work flat out. Hustle and bustle and night shifts included. There were some nail-biting moments until the end, but in the end all tasks were accomplished and the online store went live seamlessly and handled a huge amount of traffic.

Move from Magento to Shopify

The old store was running on Magento and was now to be replaced with a new Shopify store. This migration is not unusual, because many of our customers want to switch from Magento to Shopify, especially when updates or version changes are imminent. Arne Lorenzen, e-commerce store manager at Shape Republic, explains the decision for Shopify like this:

"Independence was very important to us with the new store and we also wanted to be able to make changes ourselves. Shopify is of course much more flexible and intuitive than Magento, so even people who aren't necessarily web developers can work with it."

In addition, the app infrastructure with its endless options and the ability to make all kinds of adjustments using Shopify scripts was also convincing. With product export and import, as well as the incorporation of numerous graphics, the migration itself was a rather simple undertaking. It was only when we wanted a bundle solution in the store that things got tricky again.

Bundle opportunity

That was it, the biggest challenge. Shape Republic wanted a bundle solution for the online store. Shopify does not offer the option of creating your own individual packages as a basic function. Therefore, this project had to rely on Shopify Plus. The goal was to offer customers the ability to act dynamically. It should be possible to add optional products, any new number of dropdowns should be available, fixed products as well as free products had to be possible to offer the composition of infinite bundle variants. The difficulty was not only that Shopify itself does not allow such bundles, but also to make new functionalities compatible with three different systems, namely plentymarkets, Shopify and odc.

Above all, the transfer to the ERP system was important, since inventories of individual products have to be reconciled. So perfect interaction was needed from the order in the store to the reconciliation in the ERP system to the triggering of the fulfillment service.

A creative solution had to be created. Of course, there were various applications on the market, but they could not meet the requirements in this form. So the task for us as a service provider was to program a bundle solution. This was a combination of the standard interfaces and existing apps, with one addition. Most bundle apps do not support individual packages. However, by programming on the front end, we made that possible. However, it was important to use Shopify Plus with Shopify scripts for this to ensure such customization.

Coordination of different systems

Shape Republic decided to integrate the cloud-based ERP system plentymarkets, the digital fulfillment solution from ondemandcommerce (odc for short) and the Emarsys Customer Engagement Platform. This multi-channel approach was, of course, a special task in addition to all the other challenges. We at Latori provided the link here and took on the project management to coordinate between Shape Republic itself, the ERP system used, Plentymarkets, and the odc fulfillment solution. This was often a difficult task, which we were able to master through teamwork and good communication, so that Shape Republic now benefits from automated processes in a smoothly running multi-channel environment.

More Highlights & Outlook

In addition to the individual design, the topic of upselling was also very important. At Shape Republic, there are special promotions at any time, where, for example, certain additional products are offered free of charge if a certain value is reached in the shopping cart. Behind this is programming that reads the shopping cart and then offers certain benefits to the customer depending on the value. This topic is constantly being developed by us, so that the work with Shape Republic still exists, we are in lively exchange and have weekly sprints to constantly develop and improve the online store with its individual functions favored by Shopify Plus.