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WheelWiz is a Canadian owned and operated online wheel and tire retailer, established in 2017. They have an enormous dropshipping catalog, with more than 131,000 individual SKUs.
WheelWiz had been on Magento since their inception. WheelWiz President Robert Zylc says that while it’s a good platform and allowed the team to make very specific modifications to their website, they found it difficult to work with — particularly as they migrated from Magento 1 to Magento 2.
“I think being on Magento was equally beneficial and detrimental to our success. We'd done so much customization to get the website theoretically where it should be and doing what we wanted it to, but we created a bunch of bugs along the way. That's when we realized this would not be sustainable long term if we wanted to grow in a meaningful way, particularly as a smaller business that does not have a massive team of developers to work on it.”
The WheelWiz team realized that Shopify’s leaner, quicker, more intuitive platform and huge ecosystem of apps and resources would be the better fit to accelerate growth and create a seamless and elevated user experience. After a lot of consideration, they decided to switch platforms.
As Robert searched for an agency to help WheelWiz migrate their site from Magento 2 to Shopify, he was drawn to Ethercycle because of our deep Shopify expertise and our past experience with automotive businesses and dealing with large SKU counts.
“We had interviewed about five or six agencies and Ethercycle seemed to be the logical choice. What really solidified it was having a face-to-face Zoom call with Kurt. He was very personable, very easy to talk to. He understood my needs and our business needs probably a little bit better than we did.”
We migrated WheelWiz’s very large dropshipping catalog from Magento to Shopify. We used Matrixify to bulk import all the store’s data including their products, collections, customers, orders, and metadata and set it up in Shopify, creating URL redirects where necessary.
We rebuilt the site with a custom Shopify theme to improve the user experience and help build trust with customers so they can shop with confidence.
The number one concern for customers who are buying aftermarket automotive parts online is “will this fit my vehicle?” We collaborated with another agency WheelWiz had hired — Convermax — to integrate a year/make/model selector so customers can quickly shop only for wheels that are guaranteed to fit. We also integrated fitment verification on each product detail page to confirm fitment before purchase.
We created a cleaner and upgraded design for the site, giving the store a highly professional appearance. The redesign presents tech specs in a friendly way while affirming vehicle fitment in every step of the purchase journey to help increase conversions.
A customer’s second biggest concern is “will I get what I order?” The new site displays warehouse inventory data in real time to show stock status and where the product will ship from.
We used Shopify Flow, Scripts and Matrixify to automate many actions that the WheelWiz team had previously performed manually. Orders are now automatically checked for fraud and validity and flagged if they need to be reviewed. We also wrote programmatic logic using Shopify Plus Script Editor to power on-site discounts for applicable orders. This means no more coupon codes and no incorrectly applied discounts — a win for both WheelWiz and their customers.
Robert says he appreciated how we were able to find workarounds for issues that came out of moving away from Magento’s open-source platform.
“Because of Shopify's closed nature, it’s not necessarily as easy to configure and there were certain challenges for us to figure out. There was a lot of research and investigating to do before we were able to come up with answers. Ethercycle was super helpful at finding those answers. When something didn't work, we moved on to something else and kept testing until we got that perfect recipe. Ethercycle was able to translate what we had and adapt it to the platform that they know so well. Overall I wouldn't trade it for anything because of how well and smoothly the new platform functions.”
We launched WheelWiz’s new Shopify website in August 2022. Robert says the launch went very smoothly.
“It was much, much better than our first relaunch from Magento 1 to Magento 2, which was an absolute chaotic disaster. The new site performed very well and very quickly, and we were pretty much back up and running in less than a day. The first order came through on the new platform about three hours after launching. With such a major migration, we do have fixes to make with our site structure, headers and metadata to regain ground with our SEO, but we appreciate how Ethercycle took measures to help mitigate some of the impact and are happy with how the migration went overall.”
The website is now much more user friendly and has a vastly improved customer experience. Robert says he’s delighted with how the site looks and functions, as are WheelWiz’s customers based on the feedback WheelWiz has received.
“We’ve had a lot of compliments on the site and pretty much no negative feedback, which is the opposite of what we used to get. It’s confirmed why we wanted to make this change. I was extremely confident that it would have a positive impact on the business overall and it has. I know that this is the long term platform that we want to be on and that we want to grow on.”
Shopify’s easy-to-use backend combined with the customizations and workflows that we implemented have made day-to-day work much easier for the WheelWiz team and substantially increased their efficiency. Robert says they are now able to handle a higher volume of customer emails and calls and offer more effective customer service in a shorter period of time.
Robert says he appreciated how efficient and effective our work and our communication was throughout the entire project, and how we continued to be supportive and offer help even after the project was complete. He says he couldn’t be happier with choosing us for this project and would recommend Ethercycle to others.
“Kurt has this way of knowing what you need and what you want without you even necessarily having to explain it. Shopify is a whole new world to us compared to Magento. Because Kurt has that experience and knows applications in and out, knows the functionality, he was able to make suggestions we wouldn’t have thought of. He was very good at making all these little recommendations that together have a big impact.”
Ethercycle helped WheelWiz: