From Shopify to WooCommerce, with a wholesale model Shopify could not handle

Why Shopify stopped working

The brand sells supplements to the public at retail prices, but much of its volume comes through trainers in workout studios. A trainer takes a client's order and card details on paper, then places the order. On Shopify there was no clean way for a trainer to buy at wholesale prices on behalf of many different customers, keep those customers as real accounts, and report on who sold what.

What we built on WooCommerce

• Wholesale accounts that see wholesale pricing and can place orders for their clients. Each order creates or updates the real customer's account, so the customer gets their own confirmation emails, can manage their profile and can unsubscribe.
• Cards saved to the customer, not the trainer. When testing showed cards landing on the wholesaler's account, we changed it and migrated the existing cards across.
• Tags for every wholesale customer marking them as wholesale and attributing them to a specific studio, with reports of sales by trainer and by studio, defaulting to the current month.
• Subscriptions: a one-year option on every product, billed monthly, with free shipping on any order containing a subscription and flat-rate shipping otherwise.
• A custom coupon that makes the cheapest item free when four or more products are in the cart, plus a separate code for one-time purchases once the first was extended to recurring payments.

Integrations and launch

Payments run through the brand's existing Authorize.net merchant account, inventory and fulfilment through ShipHero, and sales tax through TaxCloud for automated rates. We went through a full round of testing before switching the domain, set up the SSL certificate on the new host, and removed every test order from the system after launch.

Results

• The store moved off Shopify and live on WooCommerce in about two weeks.
• A wholesale ordering model built around how the studios actually sell.
• Reporting that tells the brand, at any time, how much each trainer and each studio has sold.

Client name and site withheld at our discretion. Details are taken from the project record.