Unity Brands operates a portfolio of well-known Canadian consumer brands — including Mastermind Toys, Kit and Ace, Tilley, and Coco Village — across multiple Shopify storefronts, with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central as the system of record for inventory, orders, and finance. Backed by retail entrepreneurs including Joe Mimran, David Lui, and Frank Rocchetti, the group brings together iconic brands under one operating umbrella.
As the portfolio grew, the infrastructure underneath it hadn't kept pace. The integration tying Shopify to Business Central had become the single biggest operational risk on the table, and it sat directly in the path of every order, weeks before peak season. Working with Shopify Plus partner Lazer, Unity stabilized the revenue-critical path first, then expanded into the storefront experience, search, and engineering practices that compound over time.
On the Mastermind Toys storefront, Unity Brands has seen a:
- 37.5% increase in conversion rate
- 71.2% increase in checkout-to-purchase rate
- 2.9 point drop in bounce rate
The challenge: A multi-brand portfolio heading into peak season with a connector in trouble
When Unity engaged Lazer in September 2025, the connector tying Shopify to Business Central was the single biggest operational risk on the table. Inventory sync jobs were unreliable. A year of credit memos was missing from the ledger at a scale that distorted financial reporting. Black Friday and the holiday peak were weeks away, and the integration that touched every order needed to hold.
Beyond the connector, the wider ecosystem carried its own weight: a stack of 70+ third-party apps with overlapping responsibilities, BOPIS journeys patched together over time, analytics gaps that obscured funnel performance, and engineering practices that hadn't yet caught up to the size of the operation.
The business needed a partner who could move fast on a connector crisis without breaking the rest of the ecosystem — and then keep moving into BOPIS, search, analytics, and engineering practices that ship change reliably.
The solution: Stabilize, document, extend
Working with Shopify Plus partner Lazer, the engagement broke down into four connected workstreams over roughly eight months.
Peak-season stabilization of the Business Central connector
Senior engineering and technical leadership went directly into Unity's connector to diagnose the failure modes in inventory jobs, order routing, and checkout and shipping logic — prioritizing the overselling, cancellation, and refund scenarios that were hurting conversion. By the end of the engagement, the rolling list of daily production incidents that had defined Unity's pre-peak operating reality was effectively gone.
BOPIS, checkout, and the storefront experience
With the foundation stable, the work moved to the customer-facing journeys that drive conversion. Key parts of the BOPIS experience were rebuilt on Shopify-native features — including the product-page-to-cart flow, pickup location visibility, and shipping-availability messaging — replacing the third-party app stack that had been propping it up. Shopify's native delivery function API improved checkout reliability for edge cases.
Search, apps, and analytics
Fast Simon search was rolled out across the storefronts to improve product findability across a complex multi-brand catalog. In parallel, a full audit of the 70+ accumulated third-party apps removed the redundant and underperforming ones, taking thousands of dollars of recurring monthly spend out of the run rate and stripping out scripts that were degrading checkout reliability. Analytics gaps in GA and the Shop Pay funnel were closed so Unity could finally see what was happening in the parts of the journey that mattered most.
DevOps, AI-assisted testing, and multi-region foundations
Unity's team adopted modern engineering standards: pull request templates, peer review, deployment hygiene, asset bundling, and a no-Friday-deploys rule that closed the most common path to weekend incidents. Weekly Business Central connector training transferred knowledge that used to live on the partner side, and an AI-assisted browser testing workflow now handles a meaningful share of regression coverage, so Unity's team can keep moving the platform forward without staffing up to maintain it.
The results: From firefighting to forward motion
Conversion and storefront performance
On the Mastermind Toys storefront, conversion rate rose 37.5% (0.64% to 0.88%) and checkout-to-purchase rate rose 71.2% (16.38% to 28.04%), while bounce rate fell 2.9 points (61.2% to 58.3%). Reliable BOPIS and checkout reduced the friction that suppresses mobile conversion, improved search lifted product findability, and same-day delivery added a fulfillment option that converts buyers who would otherwise abandon at the shipping step.
Data integrity and financial accuracy
The reconciliation work brought 70,000+ credit memos that had been missing from the year's books back into Business Central, and a custom reconciliation dashboard now gives Unity ongoing visibility into the integration. Improved inventory accuracy directly reduces the overselling and cancellation events that drive refunds and damage repeat purchase rates.
Total cost of ownership
Rationalizing the 70+ app stack took thousands of dollars of recurring monthly spend out of the run rate, and the scripts that came with those apps no longer add weight to the checkout path. Building BOPIS on Shopify-native features instead of stitched-together apps does the same at a larger scale: fewer points of failure and a footprint that's cheaper to operate as the portfolio grows.
Engineering velocity
Documented integration architecture, modernized DevOps practices, and AI-assisted browser testing changed the unit economics of every release. Regression cycles are shorter, daily incidents dropped to near-zero, and Unity's internal team can deliver more change per sprint without expanding headcount — bandwidth that used to go to production firefighting now goes to work that compounds.
Shopify and Lazer have played big roles in our digital transformation. We couldn't have asked for better partners as we evolve our business to the next stage.
What's next: Harmonization on a platform ready for scale
With the connector stable and the operating model documented, Unity is positioned to take on multi-brand harmonization across the portfolio. The next twelve months of growth can center on product conversations instead of infrastructure ones.