The Project

A migration is successful when the customers don’t notice it. That sounds trivial, but in practice it’s a serious challenge. So I wasn’t sure when an acquaintance asked me whether I could take responsibility for introducing an ERP system including a POS and switching her existing WooCommerce shop over to Shopify.

A bit of background up front:

– fashion store
– 15 employees with little IT experience
– more than 2,500 articles
– fast-changing assortment
– aside from Outlook and MS Office, no software in use
– hardware: Windows and macOS
– apart from shop maintenance for WooCommerce, no digital processes inside the relevant scope

Expectations for the project

Since it’s a single local store with the shop as an additional sales channel, the shop served as a kind of “mini ERP” with its corresponding stock levels. I’d say this setup is still in use in many small retail businesses in one form or another. That’s exactly why this project also offers a real opportunity to digitise many processes and lift the company to a new level via the ERP and the new shop. I’ll go into the individual processes in upcoming posts.

Software and hardware selection

As mentioned above, the current shop was to be replaced with Shopify. The fact that WooCommerce is primarily a blogging system is something we had to learn the hard way over the last few years too. After 10 years, several agency changes, and extensions that were no longer maintained, the shop was completely tangled up, slow, and no longer practical to use. (WooCommerce and its extremely broad plugin catalogue make it far too easy to install one thing or another without knowing what the implications are. On top of that comes security — but that’s worth its own blog series.)

Advarics & Shopify

Why these two solutions? When picking the software we first decided on Shopify because we wanted an extremely high-performance system with strict quality requirements for plugins. The often-cited drawback of limited frontend customisation is actually a huge advantage. What can’t be changed stays standard and therefore works reliably. That applies above all to the proven checkout process you can barely modify — and why would you? For us as a smaller shop operator, the potential certainly does not lie in optimising the software itself, but elsewhere.
We picked the ERP solution based on the requirements that matter most to us:
– established solution in the fashion segment
– interface to Shopify !!! (I’ll come back to this in detail later)
– feedback within the industry
– modern software architecture
– price
– support
– references (current and contactable)