The nostalgia market is booming right now. So much so, that it has entered a new word into the modern-day lexicon: Nowstalgia – the desire for the cherished people, objects, and experiences of the past that are still attainable.  

There’s a lot on this list: Y2K aesthetics, Pokémon cards, the recent Burger King rebrand...the list goes on. What’s not on the Nowstalgia list is (not surprisingly) safety equipment websites.  

Midwestern Safety Equipment (MSE) had recently acquired an ecommerce company to boost their online operations and grow their extensive catalog of safety products. They had stocked inventory, drop shipments, a solid customer base, and many warehouses and suppliers to support their operations. But they now had to contend with a newly acquired website that functioned more like a 2000s digital brochure than a modern ecommerce store.  

The site was old enough that finding someone who could work on it had become a problem. Updating products and website modifications was wildly difficult, and gathering website metrics was nearly impossible. In the truest sense of the word, they were operating blind, with no meaningful visibility into traffic, orders, or customer behavior to make informed decisions about where to take it next or grow the business.  

To add insult to injury, the website frequently stopped working altogether, leading to lost sales, poor online performance, and many angry customers. In essence, they needed to migrate from a platform that bombed to one that was the bomb dot com (a very fitting nostalgic 90s reference).

Migrating a legacy ecommerce system to Shopify 

Website before:

When you're running a growing company with modern aspirations, “we have no real way to understand or grow the ecommerce part” is never a sentence you want echoing around the Zoom meeting room.  

For most organizations who find themselves in this scenario, the smartest operational move you can do is recognize when an old system has reached the end of its useful life and replace it before bigger problems arise. Very adult. Very sensible. Very demure. Slightly less cinematic, perhaps, but so much better for everyone’s blood pressure.

You also need to protect the product data already living inside the old system, because even an outdated website can contain a surprising amount of important information: product names, descriptions, categories, images, pricing details, related products, and catalog structure are all interrelated, and losing that data would mean rebuilding and recreating intricate institutional knowledge from scratch.

MSE chose Anchor Group because of the end-to-end NetSuite and ecommerce experience we bring to the table. With the project signed and greenlit, our mission was set: build a modern Shopify storefront that MSE could manage, measure, and build on, develop the theme, and manage the business migration in a way that didn’t lose the valuable product catalog foundation already in place.  

What a successful implementation looks like

Initial meetings and scoping conversations gave everyone a solid sense of the business, the people involved, and what the new website needed to accomplish. Then came the Shopify implementation with a practical focus on structure, usability, and easy maintenance.

The work included Shopify setup, theme development, and catalog management, with special attention on scraping product data from the old website so it could be preserved and organized inside the new platform. (This was probably one of the biggest pain points of the project since the website was so old that tracking metrics didn't exist.)

The results

Website After: A cleaner, more dependable, built-for-today ecommerce presence. 

Customers could browse detailed product pages and buy through a frictionless website that was no longer limping along on outdated technology.

The move to Shopify also gave MSE the reporting visibility and clear analytics they did not have before. With Shopify’s native reporting, the team could begin reviewing key ecommerce metrics, including orders, which is crucial to understanding their newly acquired ecommerce website and customer base on a foundational level. After all, you cannot grow what you cannot see.

Also important: the new site removed the risk of lost sales caused by website instability. With the previous website’s history of breaking or stopping unexpectedly, the Shopify migration was a refreshing and sorely needed improvement—giving MSE a stable, modern platform for the business to optimize and grow, and nurture long-term customer relationships.

Our final thoughts

Q: “Integrations will create more complexity for my system, right?”

A: Wrong! When done correctly by an experienced partner (we hear they’re really good),  integrations are about creating a better foundation that can often simplify operation workflows. Case in point (and very topically): When we helped MSE move from an outdated, difficult-to-maintain legacy website to a modern Shopify storefront, the integration gave the team more control, more visibility into what was going on under the hood, more data and key metrics to make informed decisions, and a much clearer path forward to sustainable, long-term growth.

Psych! (Our actual final thoughts)

If you aren't sure if an integration or optimization is right for you, it is so important to recognize that a system that’s “technically working” and a system that’s “working well” are two very different things. If your platform is becoming too outdated to maintain, too limited to measure, or too fragile to trust (in other words, if the cons of your system start outweighing the pros), measurable, steady growth will become increasingly more difficult than it needs to (or should ever) be.  

If you're ready to give your system a glow-up and leave ecommerce nostalgia where it belongs (in the past), give us a shout and tell us what’s going on >

Not ready to talk to real humans but don’t know where to start? Try out our ecommerce platform picker, below:

Ecommerce Platform Picker