CQL is celebrating a major milestone. Over the last 30 years, the leading digital commerce agency has transformed from building mostly custom software to building digital experiences on SaaS platforms like Demandware, which later became Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Now, CQL is focusing on delivering holistic, high-performing commerce experiences for enterprise brands in both D2C and B2B.
In this new era, Shopify has become a major focus for CQL, making up over 80% of their total business. Throughout the evolution of the commerce landscape, CQL has consistently acknowledged Shopify's growing momentum in commerce. That was seven years ago, and CQL has since seen major growth for both their clients and as an agency as a result of their Shopify partnership.
“As much as we’re experts and we're watching the industry, clients always tell you what they need,” says Ryan Donahue, Shopify practice lead at CQL. “And time and time again, clients are coming to us asking about Shopify.”
Recently, they’ve seen an even greater shift toward Shopify, particularly for enterprise brands looking to migrate from Salesforce Commerce Cloud. With deep knowledge of that platform, CQL has been well equipped to help major enterprise clients make the switch, building custom solutions to help extend the Shopify platform beyond native capabilities where needed.
As a Shopify partner, CQL has experienced growth as an agency and for clients such as:
- 50-75% reduction in implementation time on average compared to Salesforce Commerce Cloud
- Identified total cost of ownership (TCO) savings ranging from $800K to $11M across 17 brands by migrating to Shopify
- More than doubled the percentage of Shopify business in under 2 years as an agency
- 18% increase in conversion, resulting in a 60% increase in online business revenue for Bauer Hockey
- 27% increase in conversion for RUDIS
The challenge: Trade complex technology for marketing growth
CQL has noticed a trend among high-end enterprise retailers: they want to drive revenue by focusing on marketing, conversion, and experience design—not costly and complex technical solutions.
Specifically, they’re looking for a tech stack with a solid foundation that will grow with them. They want to support their internal marketing team with easy-to-use tools and expansive app ecosystems that will facilitate growth, and they don’t want to deal with customization or heavy reliance on development.
What’s more, many of these brands are on Salesforce Commerce Cloud—and they’re asking specifically to migrate to Shopify.
“There's a large movement right now where [retailers] are really trying as a business to spend more money on marketing, empower your marketing team, your growth teams, to drive more revenue for the business. What we're seeing is that Shopify as a platform has been the solution that's empowering those marketers.”
—Ryan Donahue, Shopify Practice Lead, CQL
Overall, retailers are looking to reduce the total cost of ownership for their commerce platform while more seamlessly managing their experiences across multiple channels and brands. By substantially reducing costs in their tech stack, retailers are reallocating these funds to their marketing efforts to drive more revenue for their business. Overwhelmingly, CQL is helping enterprise retailers achieve these goals by migrating to Shopify.
“The amount of work that it takes to manage Salesforce Commerce Cloud, just to keep the lights on, on an ongoing basis is substantial,” says Ryan. “ And you really don't have anywhere near that level of effort on Shopify as it relates to the ongoing maintenance costs.”
The solution: Migrate to a platform fit for enterprise complexity
CQL has migrated dozens of brands from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify. Among them are enterprise retailers like TOMS, and Bauer Hockey, as well as Guthy|Renker and their full portfolio of brands.
Take TOMS. As a major fashion retailer that’s dedicated to supporting community grassroots efforts, TOMS was feeling weighed down by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. But they also weren’t sure if they could make the move to Shopify given the enterprise complexity of their platform.
TOMS worked with CQL to evaluate all of their feature sets and requirements, ultimately deciding a move to Shopify would not only be possible, but also well worth the migration in the long term. With the need to manage sites across the US, Canada, UK, and EU, they decided on a multi-site Shopify Hydrogen architecture with a headless visual content management system (CMS), Builder.io.
TOMS’ marketers can now manage sites from a single admin and employ custom mapping to keep the stores in sync. The team can drag and drop components, reuse content across pages, target and personalize content, and test and learn from robust reports to further optimize their website. They can also build new content areas for popular shoes like the Espadrille and Alpargatas, and create umbrella collections such as matching styles for categories like moms and their kids.
”The industry is seeing a very large shift right now where many ecommerce brands on Salesforce Commerce Cloud are migrating to Shopify,” says Ryan. “Our team is very well equipped and knows Salesforce inside and out. [We’re] able to help with change management as well as build out custom functionality on Shopify where the platform needs to be extended to meet some of the custom needs that brands have at the enterprise level.”
Build and manage multiple brands and channels with ease
CQL is well-versed in collaborating with complex enterprise retailers, many of which are multi-brand clients representing two, three, or even sixteen unique brands. Through their partnership with Shopify, CQL has created a blueprint to quickly roll out and seamlessly manage these brands.
“We like to call it a blueprint or a framework where we build something out that's your foundational starting point for the first brand,” says Ryan. “And then you can iterate on that over and over as you expand, whether that's your acquisition, or whether you're rebranding, re-theming your site for all of the other brands that are in the portfolio. We find Shopify much more efficient in multi-brand solutions.”
These brands typically begin with the ecommerce side of the platform, but they’ll often expand into other areas like point of sale (POS) and B2B models. CQL also uses Shopify Extensions to help retailers achieve these goals.
“ Shopify has continuously invested in their B2B functionality as well as their POS functionality, and the more robust that those get out of the box and the more APIs that they expose, the more powerful solution that we're able to build on Shopify,” says Ryan.
Streamline integrations for a unified commerce solution
The gold standard for commerce is having a unified platform that seamlessly supports your business across all channels. By migrating brands to Shopify, CQL is able to achieve just that.
“Having all those different touch points, all those ordering channels in one place really is a compelling value proposition for clients where they can have one technology that can really unify commerce in that way,” says Ryan.
Take Bauer Hockey. As part of migrating to Shopify, CQL helped the leading hockey equipment manufacturer use Shopify APIs for multiple integrations that met their business requirements. The agency then helped them roll out a custom integration with their homegrown customer data platform (CDP), as well as an integration with SAP that handled specific business requirements like employee discounts, return and refund rules, custom gear products, and applications for lifetime warranty. They also created a completely custom loyalty program using Yotpo that’s gamified for customers to earn “hockey shots” through collecting loyalty points as a way to win exclusive offers.
“Bauer would definitely define moving to Shopify as a success,” says Ryan. After migrating over, Bauer saw an 18% increase in conversion that ultimately resulted in 60% revenue increase for the online business.
Get to market faster with fewer resources
Beyond handling migrations from Salesforce Commerce Cloud, CQL has also helped brands quickly migrate to Shopify from other platforms like WooCommerce.
One of those brands is RUDIS. As the premier wrestling gear retailer, RUDIS was looking to migrate to a modern commerce platform. The challenge was that the new website had to be ready in time for Black Friday Cyber Monday.
CQL took a 4-month phased approach that included a digital refresh of the brand. They reimagined the entire user experience before handling the migration, coupling CQL’s custom software background with the many APIs available on the Shopify platform. The results were astounding. Not only was the platform ready for one of the largest shopping weekends of the year, RUDIS also saw a 27% increase in conversion.
“Gone are the days of 24 month [Salesforce] Commerce Cloud implementations. We can do things on Shopify in half or a quarter of the time that we used to on other platforms.”
—Ryan Donahue, Shopify Practice Lead, CQL
The results: Win new business with collaborative innovation
Ryan described the nature of CQL’s partnership with Shopify best by saying, “ When CQL and Shopify can come together and solution problems for clients, everyone wins.”
Throughout the partnership, CQL has had both existing clients and new prospects with very specific needs for their commerce platform. When the Shopify platform hasn’t been able to meet those needs natively, CQL and Shopify partner together to create innovative new solutions to make Shopify a reality.
“Through relationships at Shopify, we were able to have a conversation about the current state of functionality, and what we needed to achieve. We were able to come up with a solution which was able to allow that client to move to Shopify and be successful,” says Ryan.
Ultimately, it’s this relationship that has helped CQL continue to win new business. They’ve assessed total cost of ownership (TCO) savings for 17 brands, uncovering savings ranging from $800K to $11M by migrating to Shopify. When handling the migrations, they’ve also reduced the implementation time by 50-75% compared to migrations onto Salesforce Commerce Cloud. All of this has contributed to CQL more than doubling their percentage of Shopify business in under two years.
“One of the things that I'm most proud of our agency for is how we've been able to work with the product team at Shopify. I'm passionate about Shopify and their roadmap. We’re excited to continue providing our expertise and our feedback on what our clients need so Shopify can continue to remain the leader in the ecommerce space and continue to add more enterprise and more robust functionality to its platform.”
—Ryan Donahue, Shopify Practice Lead, CQL
