FOOTDISTRICT has sold exclusive sneakers and streetwear, including limited releases from Nike, Jordan, adidas, and ASICS, for 13 years. For most of that time, its ecommerce team ran on a self-hosted, open-source installation of Magento 2, where even standard requests, like adding an in-store pickup option, required a full development cycle.
In four months, FOOTDISTRICT moved its entire store, including a customer database built up over more than a decade, seven languages, and around 500 product collections, to Shopify. The move freed its IT team from day-to-day ecommerce requests and let the business grow faster.
- Revenue grew 14% in the months after launching on Shopify.
- Returning customers grew 28%.
- Average order value rose 5%.
The challenge: a self-hosted platform slowing basic requests
Before Shopify, FOOTDISTRICT ran its store on a self-hosted, open-source build of Magento 2. Antonio Alonso, CTO of FOOTDISTRICT, says every ecommerce decision ran through the technology team, because IT owned each build from planning to launch.
"Before Shopify, every ecommerce business decision had to go through IT. Project management for ecommerce was centralized in IT," Antonio says.
Even standard requests, like an in-store pickup option, meant building the feature from scratch. FOOTDISTRICT also runs a high-demand store built around limited, premium products, so its infrastructure had to absorb sharp spikes in traffic on release days. To hold off bots trying to buy those releases, the team ran a web application firewall (WAF), but it caught real shoppers in the same net.
"We had a WAF to control every attempt by bots to buy things, but that also blocked, or made it hard for, normal shoppers who wanted to buy," Antonio says.
The cost of staying on Magento kept climbing every time the team had to weigh a custom build against a third-party fix for something a SaaS platform already solved. FOOTDISTRICT decided that moving to Shopify, and to a subscription-based cost model, would close that gap.
The solution: an autonomous team and a four-month migration
FOOTDISTRICT set a three-month target for the full migration and completed it in four, working with Webimpacto for consultancy on modules, payment methods, and analytics, and continuing its existing search relationship with LAIKA. To protect the timeline, the team of three developers and one designer, all working full time, shipped a minimum viable launch that mirrored the existing site rather than redesigning it.
With the store live, the ecommerce team started making its own decisions.
"Now ecommerce can make decisions, look at apps, see how to work with Shopify. And if it needs an integration or a front-end adjustment, that's when we step in," Antonio says.
That frees us up, and now we put our focus on artificial intelligence.
The migration also carried over FOOTDISTRICT's full customer base of around 2 million users, built up over 13 years. Rather than force a mass password reset, the team launched Shopify's email-based login at the same time, which validates a shopper's email address and sends a one-time code.
Shopify Flow automatically pulls products out of active collections the moment they sell out, then reactivates them once stock returns, a job that matters across a catalog of 16,000 products with 8,000 live at any time. Growave carried over the store's wishlist data and now anchors a loyalty program still in development. Translate & Adapt runs the store's seven languages, and Matrixify moved the bulk of the historical catalog and order data into Shopify without a rebuild.
The result: faster growth and a lighter backlog
Since launching on Shopify, FOOTDISTRICT's revenue has grown 14%, order volume 13.6%, and returning customers 28%. New customer acquisition rose 4.9%, and average order value rose 5%, according to FOOTDISTRICT's commercial team.
The move briefly cost some search visibility. Shopify's URL structure is more rigid than FOOTDISTRICT's previous setup, so its redirect list covered only its highest-traffic pages. Rankings dipped after launch, then recovered. On the storefront, removing the old anti-bot rules meant real customers stopped hitting the blocks that used to generate support calls.
Bulk catalog updates now take hours instead of days.
Now I push a global update with metafields and images across 21,000 products, and it's done in two or three hours.
"We used to have a fixed cost, and there were moments when the platform cost weighed heavily during slow periods. Now it's tied to what we actually sell," Antonio says. Shopify Payments also gave FOOTDISTRICT visibility into disputes it couldn't see before, and full oversight of chargebacks that used to slip by unnoticed.