David Wagoner, Co-Founder of P3 Media, sat down with us to share how moving from Adobe Commerce to Shopify unlocked top-line growth, diversified the agency's revenue streams, and grew the team.
P3 Media is a New York based full-service commerce agency with one mission: to grow online businesses quickly and sustainably. The P3 Media team tackles everything from large-scale Shopify migrations to conversion optimization and paid social ad management.
This mission statement, however, was difficult to achieve when their practice was built around Adobe. Adobe was cumbersome, slow to roll out new features, and archaic in its infrastructure, which hindered P3's ability to deliver on their growth promises to clients.
After switching to Shopify, P3 Media has:
- Doubled their in-house team
- Served leading enterprise-level brands like Jack Rogers and American Airlines
- Significantly expanded agency top line growth by investing in brick and mortar practice alongside ecommerce migrations
Adobe was Slow and Hindered P3's Ability to Innovate and Grow
With their relationship-driven philosophy, the P3 team has always believed in approaching client needs holistically, with curiosity and an eye trained on revenue growth for their customer base.
David Wagoner, Co-founder of P3 Media, expands on P3’s working philosophy: “Once we’re confident that we’ve built a well oiled machine, we move on to the growth side of the business.”
But despite the team’s technical background, they found it challenging to ship features and updates at the pace their customers needed and deserved, let alone move onto the exciting innovations their clients sought. Whether making simple updates or replatforming client websites, Adobe Commerce slowed their workflow and prevented them from building innovative and high-growth sites.
The P3 Media team realized they needed a reliable commerce platform partner that would help them streamline their workflow and innovate at a faster pace. They turned to Shopify to transform what they could deliver.
Shopify Helps P3 Media Accelerate Their Business and Innovate for Their Clients
P3 Media wanted to partner with a commerce platform that would help them take the weight off merchants’ shoulders. With Shopify, they found just that: a fast-moving partner that could match the pace of their agency and their customers’ demands.
Shopify’s pace means that the P3 team can move rapidly to ship new website features and replatform merchant websites. Instead of getting bogged down in technicalities, they can solve problems and focus on their core mission.
“Shopify is the quickest moving, most nimble tech around,” says David Wagoner.
Shopify makes it easier—and faster—for the P3 Media team to get support if they face any hurdles. Whether they need help with a prospect or a merchant they’re working with, P3 Media has a reliable network to tap into.
“Within the Shopify ecosystem, everyone is accessible,” says David. “If we run into a roadblock with a client or a prospect we're working with, we find incredible open communication with Shopify.”
What’s more, being able to tap into a supportive partner ecosystem helps the team to fill in gaps on the technical side to solve issues for clients and prospects.
Says David: “The partnership ecosystem is robust, and we’ve found a lot of alignment within the tech partners in the ecosystem. It's nice solving big problems together.”
P3 Media has also partnered with Shopify on marketing campaigns, including co-branded editorial, paid media campaigns, and video content, broadening the agency’s reach and helping them broaden their client base.
“I find Shopify to be so open to new ideas and investing in their partners, to make their marketing ideas come to life,” says David Wagoner.
And that’s not where the receptiveness to ideas and feedback ends. The P3 Media team has been impressed with Shopify’s pace of innovation. Where other platforms have seemed closed off to new ideas and slow to make changes, Shopify’s ability to iterate quickly has impressed the team, and helped them grow.
P3 Media Doubles Their Team and Unlocks Top Line Growth
Shopify’s global presence enables P3 Media to launch their merchants’ websites into new markets and iterate quickly on their business.
If merchants are based in the US and want to expand into new regions like Latin America, Europe, or Asia, P3 Media has experience successfully leading expansion campaigns for their merchants. For instance, the team opened an international storefront for Bartesian, enabling them to sell in Canada and grow revenue by 16X.
“Shopify Markets Pro has made it easy to expand existing clients globally." –– David Wagoner, Co-Founder of P3 Media
When P3 Media started working with Shopify 7 years ago, the agency focused on SMB and middle-market brands. Since then, with the help of Shopify, they have honed their niche expertise and now execute on larger contracts with enterprise merchants.
Today, they work with anywhere from high-growth businesses to Fortune 100s. They’ve helped take brands from Kickstarter level to $100 million plus in annual revenue.
Instead of relying on an external team of contractors, the agency has brought most of its team members in-house. Partnering with Shopify has helped P3 Media grow its team at impressive rates, enabling them to serve more merchants and take on larger contracts.
“We've just about doubled our team every year,” says David. “We brought so much of our talent in-house. Seven years ago, we were outsourcing to other folks. It's given us this level of autonomy to service our clients and an ability to grow them more quickly through our partnership with Shopify.”
Ultimately, David and the P3 Media team view their partnership with Shopify as a defining moment in the agency’s impressive growth trajectory.
“If you have the opportunity to partner with Shopify, the sky's the limit. It has been one of the best decisions we've ever made.” –– David Wagoner, Co-Founder of P3 Media
Join partners like P3 Media in building high growth Shopify practices, powered by best in class commerce technology. Get started today.
