Migrating a Top 10 US Jeweler from Magento to Shopify

Challenge

Celebrating over 75 years of business with over 100 physical locations and their own in-house financing option, migrating a site like DanielsJewelers.com takes careful consideration and the right expertise. The Daniel's team needed an agency with both considered design excellence and the right technical acumen and experience, so they selected our team at Vaan to help migrate their well established Magento site to Shopify 2.0 and find solutions for their top challenges:

• Map out and build their established site functionality including their complex Daniel’s custom finance payment option, custom built free gifts with purchase, and engraving offering.
• Increase ease in site management.
• Modernize the user experience of the existing site.

Approach

Daniel’s Jewelers sought to modernize the user experience of their existing site, increase ease in site management, and build on their established site functionality encompassing complex features such as Daniel's custom credit payment option, custom-built free gifts with purchase, and engraving offerings. This project also focused on increasing internal team efficiency by streamlining routine tasks and emphasizing high-value initiatives.

The migration was primarily focused on credit financing workflows, dropship integration, and custom ERP integration.The initiative was executed in two distinct phases: The initial phase involved strategy, technical discovery, and product review, while the second phase encompassed customer-centric design, custom theme engineering, and the integration of third-party applications, such as best in class search tool and Vaan group partner, Algolia.

“the narrative is that we took a highly customized, complex Magento environment that was plugged into custom backend solutions, and have launched phase 1 to move them to a modern ecom platform in Shopify, dramatically reducing tech debt and cost of ownership while providing solutions to handle all of the business critical requirements that had to persist, including a custom payment solution for their in house credit offering, and integration to a legacy ERP with no APIs.”

Empowering Checkout: Daniel's Credit Innovation

This project features intricate technical workflows and introduced what we believe to be a pioneering innovation for Shopify checkout—a tailor-made credit payment option called Daniel's Credit. The Daniel's Credit System guarantees every customer financing, allowing them to add items to their cart, proceed to checkout, and select "Daniel's Credit" as the payment option. The site then provides an estimated down payment and monthly installment price without the need for credit approval. Traditionally buy now pay later (BNPL) solutions offered in the market today involve a credit approval process where the provider assesses their creditworthiness or risk and decides whether to approve the customer's request. But the Daniel’s team believes everyone should have access to make their dream purchase and therefore offers their own credit option. Knowing that an out of the box solution for buy now pay later would not be possible for Daniel’s, Vaan engineered a custom payment app on Shopify. As a Shopify Plus Partner, we worked closely with Shopify to develop this custom payment app, leveraging Shopify's payment APIs. Customers had the option to apply for credit through two channels, Daniel's Credit and DPay, and upon approval, the system completed their orders and notified the ERP of the transaction.

Universe - Daniel’s 20 Year Old File Based ERP

The Daniel’s Jewelers site is powered by a 20 year old ERP system that is custom built by Daniel’s internal engineering team. Over the last 20 years the custom system had built up a significant number of rules and business processes making it impossible to leave behind in a migration. The file based ERP system injects every order that is placed, every invoice generated, every refund and so forth. Additionally, the ERP also sends and transmits information back to Shopify for every fulfillment and reconciliation. Migrating away from Magento and onto Shopify would not have been possible without the ERP along with it so Vaan built middleware that connects Daniel’s legacy ERP by reading the Shopify API and listening to webhooks to transform the data into a file that the ERP accepts. The middleware then has a scheduling mechanism within which dispatches files into the erp at a given daily cadence. Vaan modified the Daniel’s ERP to send the files to our middleware where it intakes the files and updates Shopify via API. With the end result for the merchant being the achievement of an end to end integration of Daniel’s ERP into the complete Shopify ecosystem the Daniel’s was able to continue with business as usual.

Enhancing User Experience

To maintain feature parity with the existing Magento site, Vaan engineered a custom free gift widget that allows customers to add free products to their cart, following the same rules from the previous platform. This custom widget empowers the Daniel's team to easily swap out which free products are being offered without requiring support, contributing to the goal of increased ease in site management.

Elevating Personalization

Engravings had been built as a custom integration within Magento prior to migration. Recognizing the need to offer custom fields for engraving, Vaan created custom line item properties in Shopify on the product pages to allow for engraving natively within the platform.

Outcomes and Benefits

With the migration to Shopify, Daniel's Jewelers has experienced several benefits. They have increased non-development team throughput by allowing for easier ongoing site management and merchandising on Shopify. The custom solutions implemented have not only met the client's unique needs but also streamlined and improved their e-commerce operations.

“We knew migrating a heavily customized, omnichannel Magento site into the Shopify Platform was going to be difficult. We needed a partner that had the experience & expertise to handle this complex challenge. VAAN Group really rose to this challenge and delivered a site that without compromise. I'm very pleased with their service and ongoing support.”

Conclusion

Using Brand Conversion Design our deep Shopify expertise and Magento Migration experience. The Daniel’s Jewelers site highlights Vaan's capability to handle complex e-commerce migrations and develop custom solutions that cater to their client's specific requirements. If you are looking to transform your e-commerce platform, consider partnering with Vaan for a tailored solution.

Contact Vaan today to discuss your e-commerce project.