BioImmersion
Finding the Right Solution with a Shopify Rebuild
A Holistic Approach
BioImmersion, founded by Seann and Dr. Dohrea Bardell, produces and sells their plant-based therapeutic food supplements directly to consumers.
We worked with BioImmersion on their first eCommerce store in 2016 which was built on Magento 1 open source edition, and custom-designed by Hovie Hawk. But when Magento 1 support ended in June 2020, it was time to make a move and Shopify was the right fit with their robust presence in the small business market.
Shopify is a fully-hosted platform, taking away some of the headaches that come with maintaining your own server environment, maintaining security in the server and application, and managing new releases and upgrades. All of that costs money, and as a small business, it made sense for BioImmersion to take advantage of those savings.
In addition, BioImmersion’s fulfillment partner had recently completed a Shopify integration with their warehouse management system, so they could process orders at the warehouse without needing to build an integration from scratch.
Creating the Foundation
BioImmersion was in the midst of updating their brand when they came to us, so we opted to complete their migration with one of the standard Shopify themes to help keep costs in check.
There is a fairly large library of standard Shopify base themes to choose from, and we worked with their designer to narrow it down to something that could work well with their graphics and copy, with some customizations still to come.
Once the store’s theme was in place, we did an initial migration using Cart2Cart shopping cart migration service for existing customers and orders. We replicated payment gateway settings, expanded their shipping options for international orders thanks to Shopify’s negotiated discounted shipping rates, and used an app to integrate with their third-party logistics provider (3PL).
They have a relatively small catalog of primary products, so rather than doing an automatic migration, we chose to set up the inventory and catalog by hand. Within a few days we had their store created (and largely functional at this point).
Customizing Shopify
There were a few theme areas the designer wanted to improve upon, and our front-end development team handled theme customization using familiar technologies from Bootstrap JS, Javascript, HTML and CSS. When future core Shopify upgrades come up, we’ll simply reapply the custom theme as part of our deployment process to ensure everything looks and works like it’s supposed to.
In addition to selling directly to consumers, the BioImmersion team maintains relationships with doctors who are familiar with their products, and needed to customize a Shopify webform with additional fields to help customers identify practitioners during the login process. This was redone using an existing shopify app.
The new BioImmersion website went live in September 2020.