“The Retail Express and Shopify integration is allowing us to offer the best in-store and online shopping experience to our customers. We feel like we have a solution that is the right fit for our business – it’s powerful, intuitive and affordable for a growing omni-channel retailer”
– Mike Edmiston, Managing Director
Return on Investment Summary
Managing Bricks & Clicks Growth
Bstore opened its first retail store in 2001 with the mission ‘to provide stylish footwear that feels awesome to wear’.
Since their inception, their team of footwear experts have constantly scoured the globe for the best brands in each category that deliver on strict criteria for style, genuine comfort and the perfect fit for healthy, happy feet.
Their unwavering commitment to product quality and customer service excellence enabled them to steadily expand their retail footprint to 8 stores and a high-traffic eCommerce site.
However, along with that business growth came the need to manage much more complexity. The Bstore team were increasingly finding situations where their old POS software was unable to cope with the larger multi-store operation they had built.
For that reason, in 2017 they decided to roll out Retail Express across all their stores to consistently deliver the best customer experience possible and gain better visibility and control over their inventory.
Moving from Magento to An Integrated Shopify & Retail Express Solution
Bstore had built their original eCommerce store in Magento which integrated with Retail Express to synchronise their online and in-store operations. However, in 2019, Magento changed from version 1 to 2 and Bstore had to face the highly disruptive situation of needing to rebuild their entire eCommerce store.
“The Magento v2 change presented a major business challenge for us – it effectively meant we needed to start from scratch with our eCommerce presence and face all the business expense that comes with that. However, Retail Express presented a compelling alternative solution to us. Rather than rebuild our site in Magento, they recommended we use Shopify to build our new online store and directly integrate to Retail Express via their native Shopify Connector they had developed.” said Mike.
“They demonstrated to us that Shopify had developed an eCommerce platform that was on par with Magento in terms of scalability, features and search engine optimisation but with a much more affordable price tag." said Mike.
"On top of that, the cost of investment was less than we would have had to outlay to build a Magento v2 site. Retail Express had been such a stable and trusted POS solution partner we decided to proceed with their recommendation and went about building our new Shopify store and integrating it with their POS software” Mike continued.
Enabling Omni-Channel Best Practice via the most advanced Shopify Connector
The native Shopify Connector developed by Retail Express is a truly unique integration offering the most advanced capabilities in the market.
By building out a Shopify eCommerce presence that integrates directly with Retail Express, Bstore have been able to leverage all their store inventory online and display live stock levels to maximise customer choice and sales potential.
Bstore are now in the process of launching live Stock-in-Store and offering instant Click & Collect to satisfy customer demand for immediate access to goods, and to further drive in-store foot traffic.
"The native integration capabilities of the Shopify Connector developed by Retail Express are highly advanced, opening up significant new omni-channel opportunities for us. We feel like we’re on a much more scalable eCommerce solution for our business size with Shopify. The power of Retail Express then enables us to offer the best in-store and online experience for our customers, optimise our inventory and integrate all our data and processes across all channels.”
– Mike Edmiston, Managing Director
A Seamless Migration
Whilst the solution presented made commercial sense, Mike certainly didn’t enter the process of changing all his software platforms without some degree of trepidation.
"Migrating to a new eCommerce site was a daunting concept – it would be for any retailer. Add to that the need to then integrate that new eCommerce platform with your existing POS software and it certainly feels like there is a lot of change and moving parts to manage." said Mike.
However, Mike's concerns were quickly alleviated thanks to the guided expert implementation service included as standard for all Retail Express customers and the robust, feature-rich capabilities of their new cloud tech stack.
I can honestly say that everything went really well. The Magento to Shopify migration was very smooth and stable. The integration between Retail Express and Shopify was seamless.
It goes to show that with the right planning and software partners involved, you can implement digital transformation while still ensuring business continuity.”
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