Migrating Hamilton’s favourite seller of quality kitchenware to Shopify.

The Scullery is enjoying their new website built with Shopify, packing in all the features to scale their business.

The Challenge

The Scullery is Hamilton’s favourite seller of quality kitchenware, trusted for over 20 years and stocking the best quality brands.

The Scullery used a custom built ecommerce solution for over a decade, but with the rise of Shopify they were looking to migrate over so that they could utilize the features of the platform. Shopify is great for both large and small businesses, providing built in solutions for everything you need to run your store like payment gateways, inventory management, order fulfillment and more.

The Scullery chose KiwiSprout to develop their new Shopify website because they knew we had a strong set of experience, working with some of New Zealand’s largest stores in a variety of industries.

The Process

Planning & Research

Every store is different, and that’s why the first thing we do is learn about the client and their customers. We want to know their branding, core values, goals for the website, and how their target audience interacts with the website.

From our planning and research we learnt how valuable their brand research was, and used that to come up with key messages that related to why customers love to shop with them. We also identified a strong segment of customers that used the website to buy gifts for special occasions and used that information to plan a built in gift-finder that effectively engages the target audience.

Design

With our planning and research, we started to create the designs using one of the fastest growing design tools, Figma. Figma allows us to create professional designs quickly for every type of page we need on both desktop and mobile devices.

As part of our design process we tested different ways to implement the gift finder, a key piece of functionality. The design phase is great for experimenting and prototyping ideas before we commit development time to them, and Figma’s prototyping features make it possible to click through the designs like we would with the final product which is perfect for testing the user experience.

When the final designs were ready, we sent them to The Scullery to preview.

Development & Migration

As part of migrating The Scullery to Shopify, we had to migrate their legacy database of over 4000 photos, 1200 products, and 200 categories. Preserving the data so that nothing is lost in the transfer is especially important for stores, where accurate data like stock and product prices is crucial for operation.

The first step in migrating a legacy database over to Shopify is understanding it’s structure including how the data is stored and the relationship between its data. For custom legacy websites, this process can be complex, but we have a strong set of experience in database migration.

After we mapped out how the old database is structured, we then had to create code using NodeJS that took data out of the old database, then connected with Shopify API to recreate the data in the Shopify store in a format that Shopify understands.

With their data migrated, we got to work on developing the website in Shopify. As we develop the website, our changes occur on a staging link in Shopify, so that we can show our client where we are at during check-ins.

With the designs signed off, we began developing the website in Shopify. As we develop the website, our changes occur on a staging link in Shopify, so that we can show our client where we are at during check-ins.

One of The Scullery’s needs was the ability to filter collections by brand and price, the two ways we could achieve this is with an app or a custom solution. An app takes less development time, but they aren’t as customisable and often include a regular expense, whereas a custom solution takes time to develop but provides full customisation and much lower costs to run. For The Scullery we built a serverless API to handle quickly searching and filtering products. The benefit of the API being serverless was quick loading times and easy management so we could integrate new features quickly.

As part of our development process we also made sure the store has an optimal loading time, good user experience, and content geared to ran well for SEO.

Launch

With the staging website signed off and everything ready to go live, we scheduled a go-live date and prepared for launch.

As part of the go-live process, we perform a full quality assurance to make sure we are delivering the best quality experience possible.

We handled the DNS transfer for a quick swap from the old website to the new website, and the website was deployed live onto Shopify at the scheduled go-live date with no issues.

The Results

With the launch of their new website, The Scullery is enjoying all of Shopify’s great features that make operating a store easy, as well as a great user experience for their customers.

"Excellent service. Mitchell was knowledgeable and accommodating and produced great results." - Hayden, The Scullery