# Y’s Recipes Migrates Ecommerce Platforms to Shopify

In 2014, beauty and diet writer Yoko Tsang founded Y’s Recipes to retail the skincare and health food products that she was sharing with her online followers. After a number of years in ecommerce, Y’s Recipes was ready to scale its online sales. They engaged Wave Commerce to help them migrate from their previous ecommerce solution to Shopify’s cloud-based ecommerce platform to provide customers with a world class online shopping experience and their team with a user-friendly platform to maintain. Wave Commerce worked with Y’s Recipes to successfully migrate their existing product and customer information and launch on Shopify, utilizing the platform’s features to improve customer experiences.

Background

By 2019, Y’s Recipes had a successful online retail store built. Yet, they realised that Shopify offered features that improved user experience for both shoppers and the staff team. They wanted to leverage Shopify’s visually-focused storefront, user-friendly store admin, and app ecosystem to scale their ecommerce operations. They needed to migrate over a hundred products to Shopify and in the process redesign the way they presented their collections and site navigation. Additionally, they wanted to ensure that customer data could be successfully transferred, with minimal disruption for their loyal customers. They engaged Wave Commerce to find out whether they could successfully create a new Shopify store that could efficiently build on their past experience to impress their fans and new customers.

Solution

Wave Commerce assessed Y’s Recipes online store migration needs and provided a road map that could help them efficiently set up a new store with the latest ecommerce features, while also ensuring that it would be simple to maintain. In addition to building a Shopify store that matched the client’s design requirements, Wave Commerce provided a systematic approach to migrating product and customer data. Finally, Wave Commerce worked with the Y’s Recipes team to ensure their customers were informed about the transition, could seamlessly set up their accounts and enjoy the benefits of the newly designed store.

Migrating Products and Creating a Product Collection

Y’s Recipes decided to redesign their online store to take advantage of Shopify’s sophisticated cataloguing and navigation features, as well as extensive integrations. Wave Commerce worked with Y’s Recipes to create a dynamic storefront that could present collections in various ways according to customer needs. According to the client’s designs, Wave Commerce created a store that showcased various product lines, provided a customized navigation menu, search filters, and display preferences. The many product lines were categorised in a way that was intuitive to their customers, and easy to tag for the Y’s Recipes team.

Migrating Data and Managing Customer Account Migration

Successful data migration was essential for a smooth customer experience for Y’s Recipes. Wave Commerce performed a custom migration over to Shopify that efficiently migrated both critical product and customer information.

To ensure accuracy, Wave Commerce worked with the client through several iterations of data migration, confirming that fields from client’s existing ecommerce platform would match on Shopify. As the two platforms had data fields with different interpretations, Wave Commerce provided custom treatment. Product information was not only transferred, but product collections, categories, and tags were added to the new store to create an efficient cataloguing system. In addition, the Shopify “Customer Note” section was applied to record important information to enhance the company’s customer engagement efforts.

Wave Commerce also helped Y’s Recipes map out key aspects of the migration that would have implications on customer communication. For example, customer emails could be validated for a smoother migration, but customer account logins could not be migrated. This meant that customers would have to create new passwords on the Shopify store. This key aspect was passed on to Y’s Recipes staff so that they could prepare notifications for existing customers.

Designing Migrations and New Features Around Customer Experience

Y’s Recipes understood that customer satisfaction was essential for business success. As such, Wave Commerce worked with Y’s Recipes to design a multi-channel customer communication approach that prepared customers for the company’s new Shopify store. During the store’s design phase, Y’s Recipes created banners on their previous store and sent newsletters to inform customers of the upcoming changes. When the new Shopify store was about to launch, Y’s Recipes sent notifications that explained future account activation steps.

Customers who used the new Shopify store could immediately benefit from the platform’s additional features, such as app integrations to improve operations. As Y’s Recipes was previously offering locker pickup as a shipping method, they built pickup options into the Shopify store checkout flow using Wave Commerce’s HK Pickup Options app. This app immediately provided over 1000 pickup locations for shoppers’ convenience, ensuring that their positive online shopping experience continued from the online store through to order fulfillment.

Y’s Recipes proved that with careful planning, migrating an online store with legacy customer and order data to Shopify can have both immediate and long-term benefits. With proper data mapping and migration, a company can transfer customer information and order history to build on its prior ecommerce experience. With a clear customer engagement strategy and an upgraded storefront, Y’s Recipes was able to demonstrate their commitment to their customers.