Ditching legacy commerce software: The journey of a 9-figure Business into Shopify Plus

A couple of months ago, my colleague Jakub Li?ka (one of our project managers at Sounds Good Agency | Shopify Experts ) threw me a challenge:

I was supposed to make a video about my experience of cooperating with OKAY and helping them move from a custom solution to Shopify Plus .?

Here’s the full context (in Czech):

Having failed to do this before, I thought about overcompensating and making a dedicated article about it ??

Let me set the stage for you:

• Okay is one of the most successful Electronics and Furniture Commerce (online and offline) companies in Czechia and Slovakia
• They were running a old-ish solution from a very successful agency at the national level. It worked, but it was not flexible and needed a revamp.
• It was time for a much needed upgraded, and everyone agreed on it.

So, what happened next?

Questioning the status-quo

COVID happened. And that changed everything. The CIO of Okay - Ková? Vladislav - was already more than ready to pull the trigger on a new cooperation for a new version of their custom solution.

What could go wrong? That’s the best way to do it according with the reigning common-sense.?

But the pandemic put many things in this world into a halt, this project included. That meant, there was a new chance for reflection and renewal. That’s when Vladislav heard about Shopify and Shopify Plus - a growing trend not only in North-America, but also in the EMEA region.

There was a specific slogan that kept ringing in his head:

You don’t need an army of developers!

You can achieve great things, have a scalable platform and innovate fast with a cost-efficient and goal-oriented team. Shopify makes that dream possible.

But was it true? Or just a foolish and naive dream?

Look and you shall find

At this level of game, you can’t play around with wild bets. So the hero of our story did what any good CIO or CTO would do. Analysis. Verification. Assurance.?

He contacted the top local Shopify Partners nationwide to get to know more about the platform, its capabilities and limitations. Besides he needed to know if he could find great assets locally to assist with the building.

I was fortunate enough to be one of the guests on these conversations. From the get go, it was clear to me this wouldn’t be your “typical Shopify project”. It would be an awesome and challenging Shopify Plus journey!

While discussing the project with all these people who I considered more successful than me (impostor syndrom!!!), I noticed one thing… WE CAN ACTUALLY DO THIS!

A small surge of boldness pushed me to throw myself into this adventure.

Think, think, think

Once we established a clear path for cooperation and built enough trust between everybody, it was time to start breaking down this marathon, into smaller sprints. In the first one or two month we did a deep analysis of their many needs trying to find a deal breaker, something we couldn’t implement in some way on Shopify.

As per usual, almost everything was possible in one way or another. We showed Okay our architecture proficiency and assured them that there were many open paths to solve their concerns and fears of being the first big Czech player moving to Shopify Plus.

Work, work, work.

After having a clear path to solve the most challenging requirements we put together an MVP based roadmap to launch on Shopify and test it’s capabilities. We launched the store Jena Nabytek in 2 months of cooperation and soon start processing orders and reservations. This was a crucial beta launch to test a smaller amount of orders being processed into SAP without any problems. After the first store we focused on the more challenging okay.sk and launched it before the Christmas season. Okay was fearful in the beginning, but they were quickly convinced of the scalability of Shopify after one high season without major blockers and 0 downtime. Our work in cooperation with their team was finally bringing fruits.

The last step of this major transition was to launch the Czech version of their store, which corresponds to the majority of their online sales. All of this was a lot of hard work, with many challenges, meetings and discussions. But the outcome was spectacular and brought the magic of Shopify easiness of use and flexibility to a giant of the Central Europe commerce.?

Keep at it!

Launching these stores was just the beginning of a new era. Being on Shopify, okay didn’t have to pay us anything to keep the store running, but they were able to invest into new functionalities, pushing the limits of what most people consider a closed store box or platform. While we built a login protected version of the website for their sellers to increase the sales in the stores, okay partnered with Porta under our recommendation to integrate Shopify with PIM Core.

This was the last piece of the puzzle required to allow okay to jump internationally! Without any input from our side, they were able to easily put together the German version of their store to start jumping into new horizons: https://www.okaymoebel.de/

Enough with the status-quo

It’s time to stop believing the old paradigm. Most businesses still think that arrives a time where they must pay hundreds of thousands if not millions to have their custom solution built in an old fashion way tailored to their needs. Not only this is expensive, but opens the possibility of a terribly frightening vendor-lock. It’s time to understand that with Shopify and Shopify Plus, you can achieve whatever you want and much more. Not only that, but you can do it with a huge autonomy, by having a small internal team and cooperating with the right specialists.

?? Share this story in your feed so more people can be inspired on how to run a big business in a cost efficient an innovative way. If you’re not convinced yet, just write your questions in the comments ??

Do you want to know how I can help you achieve results with Shopify?

Please feel free to contact me at:

• LinkedIn profile
• shopify(at)davidjose.net
• iMessage / WhatsApp: +420 774 041 374