Migration: Westend DJ

Westend DJ - Brand Overview

Westend DJ is an established London-based DJ equipment specialists serving the nation's favourite DJs and music producers. The original storefront was long overdue a design refresh and their huge catalogue of products meant that this migration was no small task - but our team of experts were relishing the challenge.

With 25 years behind them, Westend DJ is had cemented itself as a well-known name in music circles with thousands of loyal customers. Their online presence needs to reflect their brand values and present themselves as the market leader that they are – as well as being able to handle a high volume of orders.

This well-loved brand has over 10,000 customers and just as many product variants.

This case study explores how we helped Westend DJ unleash themselves from the shackles of their aging storefront and open up new growth opportunities as they launch on Shopify Plus.

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Migration from Magento to Shopify Plus

Westend DJ had been running their ecommerce store on Magento for many years. That worked for them, for a time. However, Magento is a platform that has been on a downward trend for a while now, while Shopify is constantly innovating and pushing the boundaries of what's possible within the ecommerce world. Early this year Shopify announced over 100 product updates in the latest Winter Editions.

So the challenge here was to take the existing Magento website – with its huge catalogue, decades of history, and a great deal of hard-earned brand trust – and turn that into something powerful and new, which would give the client access to all the improvements, security, and added features of a modern, top-tier ecommerce platform.

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Meticulous Migration Planning

We are no strangers to handling complex migrations and Westend DJ are certainly not the first retailer to make the decision to leave Magento and migrate to Shopify Plus.

Each conversation starts off the same as we discuss the pain points of their existing platform as well as a wish list of new features they would like once they move to Shopify. However, while each conversations starts off the same, our 15 years experience of working on Shopify the most important thing we've learned is no two projects are the same.

A workshop is required to build out a detailed migration plan & store build.

The workshop will cover all the essential parts of the migration. Depending on the specific requirements of the merchant this could include content migration, custom UX design, bespoke app development or even integration to trusted tech partners. W‍hen it comes to the store migration - Westend DJ the had a significant amount of content to migrate.

• Over 10,000 product SKUs.
• Over 10,000 customer accounts,
• Hundreds of historic blog posts with important SEO value,

And due to the technical nature of the products, the product information included details such as in depth technical specification, product videos and much more. Meaning we were required to make use of product level meta-fields to handle additional product information. However when planning a migration you can become too focused on just the website

but you also need to remember that you're not just migrating products & content, you are also migrating a business.

When planning any migration to Shopify you need to ensure the when the new store launches on Shopify it works with their existing infrastructure & logistics. Everything from inventory management & third party logistics needs to be taken into consideration.

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Building on Strong Foundations

The most exciting part of any new store build is when you start to look at the user experience. It wasn't that long ago that to get a premium experience on Shopify you required a bespoke design & store build.

With the introduction of Shopify 2.0 themes the off the shelf templates have become an excellent starting point for a new store build.

It is important to select the right theme, the more functionality that is solved right out of the box will minimise the amount of time required to customise the theme and allow for a quicker & smoother launch.

Just as important as functionality, the customisation options made available within the theme need to give our creative team the flexibility to showcase Westend DJs brand values online and create something they can really be proud of.  

Trusted Tech Partners to Enhance Your Store

One of the strongest benefits of building your on ecommerce store on Shopify is the mature ecosystem of Shopify apps that can be used to extend the functionality of your store.

Given the volume of sales that Westend DJ handles, and the degree of bespoke functionality that their ecommerce store would require, we needed to integrate some clever app solutions. These included:

• ClearPay & Novuna – Financing app to give customers options to spread the payment.
• Zoho – Customer service taken care of via this intelligent chat integration,
• Klaviyo – Email & marketing integration with the best-in-class tool.
• Alvio – Collaborative commerce platform that can massively boost the reach of ecommerce stores through partnerships.
  

Bespoke UX Solutions

Sometimes there are requests which either can not be solved via an off the shelf app, or it's more cost effective to build a bespoke solution into the theme and avoid the on-going monthly app fees. This includes:

• Shipping cut off times - For example only offer "Next Day Delivery" before 3pm.
• Premium delivery days - Allowing you to charge extra for weekend delivery.
• Preorders, Products Bundles & Stock Noficiations. ‍

The Result: A Fantastic Modern Store for a Well-Loved Brand

We were particularly proud to get the opportunity to work with Westend DJ and we're very happy with the results. Most importantly the client was absolutely thrilled with thei new site reporting that...

"The inspira team knocked it out of the park"

Another fantastically delivered website and we look forward to seeing some performance stats over the coming months.

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