Complete Migration to Shopify + Custom App

Background

Client sells highly discounted dietary supplements direct-to-consumers that they purchase from inventory liquidators. Since their stock comes from liquidations, it varies constantly over time.

Problem

Before Fledgling, Client has been using a on online store that a previous developer has custom-coded in PHP. Client was having increasing difficulty with getting their previous developer to do regular maintenance and improvements on their online store, and decided they wanted to switch to an easier platform, and they chose Shopify.

However, there was some custom functionality that they had in their previous store that they wanted to keep in their new Shopify store: They sold lots of bundled products, and their custom store offered customers the ability to choose the variants for each item in the bundle (e.g. 5 items of Product A and 3 items of Product B, choose which 5 flavors of A and 3 of B that you want). This was a feature that was not available in any app in the Shopify App Store.

They needed this feature because many of their customers have told them that it is the main thing that sets them apart from their competitors.

They also had a legacy sales database that they needed to be able to generate tax-related reports from during the year they made the migration.

Solution

Fledgling handled the complete migration from their legacy custom-built online store to Shopify. We migrated all their data from their MySQL database, including their product and customer databases, by writing a custom script to download the tables and generate CSV files in the required format for import into Shopify. We also helped them select, install, and configure all their off-the-shelf apps from the Shopify App Store, including product reviews, tax compliance and accounting, social media, and digital marketing.

Fledgling also built a custom Shopify app that allowed Client’s customers to choose the variants for each of the bundled products. The custom app would check the inventory of each variant of each product in the bundle, and only allow the customer to choose a variant if it was in stock, preventing overselling. The app also integrated with their inventory management system to update inventory levels for each variant whenever a bundle was sold. The app also integrated with Client’s 3rd-party logistics provider to send the SKUs for each variant the customer selected in a purchased bundle, so that the logistics provider could pick and pack the order correctly (which eliminates the need for pre-packing bundles, as many other vendors do, and allowed the Client to continue to invent and sell creative bundles of their constantly-changing products).

We also built a custom report-generator tool that allowed the Client to generate tax-related reports from their legacy sales database. The client just had to enter the start- and end-dates, and the tool would generate a spreadsheet with the sales by state, and the sales tax collected for each state, which they could then use to file their sales tax returns for the year they made the migration.