Finishers Depot is an industrial coatings company in Baytown, Texas that provides top-notch wood finishing products, Touch-Up products, and other products for professionals that need to get the job done.
In 2022 Wood Finishers Depot rebranded to Finishers Depot to reflect their expanded product offerings to professional end users. Along with this rebrand, Finishers Depot wanted to completely modernize their eCommerce experience. This project was a major overhaul including a full-site redesign, development and platform migration from OSCommerce to Shopify. The initiative involved a three-way collaboration between Marketing Refresh, Shanty Town Design, and Plentiful Commerce. We at Plentiful Commerce were in charge of the Shopify store setup, development and Shopify migration services.
Project goal
Finishers Depot’s main goal was to bring their eCommerce experience into the 21st century. As a result, Finishers Depot would maintain a competitive advantage and be able to scale the business while providing the same high quality to their customers.
Based on their goal, we focused on three large improvements for the new site. We’ll go in more depth in the Development section below:
- Self-service features for customers
- Frictionless comparison between product types
- Position themselves as experts in industrial finishing
Why move from OSCommerce to Shopify?
OSCommerce is a free and open-source eCommerce platform developed in 2000. Finishers Depot had ambitious goals to scale and innovate and they felt that they had outgrown OSCommerce.
Here’s why eCommerce businesses move to Shopify
- Shopify hosts everything on the platform
No self-hosting needed. Finishers Depot had to secure their own hosting from OSCommerce and have a webmaster maintain hosting and back-end operations.
- Easy to customize the whole platform for non-technical staff
OSCommerce has complete flexibility and customization, however that can be a bad thing if you don’t have a technical background. Finishers Depot’s main priority was an easy backend experience for their non-technical employees to manage the day-to-day. This would reduce headache all-around and save time to allow them to scale their operations.
- Multi-channel selling
From Amazon, and Faire to Etsy and Alibaba, you can sell wherever you please and manage it all from Shopify.
How to migrate from OSCommerce to Shopify with our Shopify migration services
Since OSCommerce and Shopify data formats are quite different, the migration process was not as smooth as more similar platforms like Etsy or WooCommerce. OSCommerce is self-hosted on a database so the files we received from the webmaster were raw SQL files. We manually converted the files to Shopify-friendly data and bulk-upload them using Matrixify. Additionally, we also cleaned up the data as there were customers with up to 12 duplicate accounts. Our team of Shopify Experts made sure that all data – products, customers and orders – were migrated properly. With Plentiful Commerce’s Shopify migration services no data or SEO positioning was lost. The data was consolidated and optimized to account for years of account duplication and lack of data validation.
Development
The design of the site was focused on using eCommerce best practices to help customers navigate the site as frictionless as possible. The site was custom-designed for the Finishers Depot brand and their customers. We made sure to include as many relevant theme settings as possible so Finishers Depot would have full control over the theme after our project.
Returning back into the three main features we wanted to focus on, here are the ways we addressed them:
- Self-service features for customers
Providing customers with self-service features helps both parties save time and resources without the hassle of back and forth communication. We decided to offer three main self-service features: the ability to reorder previous purchases, download invoices and purchase training classes. We allowed customers to easily purchase training workshop tickets through an event calendar, rather than calling the store directly.
- Frictionless comparison between product types
Finishers Depot offers many products with numerous variants like color and sheen and it’s possible to have up to a dozen options for one product. Instead of forcing customers to navigate to each product type manually as they did before, we decided to provide a table below the product to show a quick view of the variants. This allows them to quickly compare and add multiple variants to the cart if necessary.
- Position themselves as experts in industrial finishing
Finishers Depot has been in business for over 20 years and has perfected their coloring technique and finishing practices. They wanted to be the leader in industrial finishing products and educate others in the practice. Therefore they wanted to offer a training hub that contain downloadable PDFs, blogs, videos and professional training classes.
Additional development highlights:
- Wholesale prices for customers who are special members
- Recommended products section in blog posts
The results
The platform migration and new site build was a great success! Equally important, there were no losses in customer data or SEO positioning. Finishers Depot is now able to confidently start their rebrand and new business goals on a secure platform like Shopify.
Having experienced Shopify professionals to oversee the migration of a large business like Finishers Depot is the best way to go for a stress-free experience. Leave your trust in us to get it done. Reach out to our experts at Plentiful Commerce to discuss your specific needs. We can aid in migrations from Etsy, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magneto and more.
