Beauty Industry Group

Migrating Beauty Industry Group’s Zala Hair site from Magento to Shopify

Consumer

Design

Our Impact

We helped Beauty Industry Group (BIG) launch the Zala Hair Extensions website after migrating them from Magento to Shopify and building a custom theme frontend to drive conversions.

Significantly reduced BIG’s total cost of ownership by $300K+ a year
Consolidated three domains into one storefront using Shopify Markets
Migrated 2,000+ products with custom middleware, including media and international prices
Imported 200,000+ orders and customers to the new store
Created a reference architecture BIG can use across their brands

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Beauty Industry Group (BIG) is inspiring confidence across the globe.

As a holding company of more than a dozen beauty industry brands, BIG specializes in professional and direct-to-consumer hair extension products.

THE VISION
BIG wanted to lower their total cost of ownership by migrating Zala Hair from Magento to Shopify and consolidating three domains into one unified storefront. With the platform shift and storefront redesign, they were looking to increase conversion rates, drive sales, improve their analytics, and more.

WHY LAZER?
Lazer is extremely well-versed with migrating storefronts from Magento to Shopify. As one of Shopify’s trusted agencies and one of their few Platinum partners, we are experts in all areas of Shopify design and development, including frontend themes, data migration, UI/UX design, backend infrastructure, and custom apps.

Visit Zala Hair

platform

Web
Shopify
Magento

Expertise

UI/UX Design
Frontend Development
Backend Development
Infrastructure Development
Integrations
Data Migration

Stage

Private

Approach

Building a custom Magento to Shopify migration app

Since existing migration solutions wouldn’t work for the timeline and requirements we were working with, we built a custom migration service to vacuum data from Zala’s Magento API and send it to Shopify’s API.

This included:

A component that interacts with Shopify’s GraphQL API, allowing operations like retrieving products and updating product fields (e.g., changing a product title).
Using a client generator on Magento’s API to talk to it and enable operations such as retrieving inventory, pulling orders, and working with product data. The generated API client contains about 10,000 lines of code.
A central processing unit that functions as the middleman or switchboard, taking data from Magento, applying transformations if necessary, and outputting it in a format that Shopify can understand.

Approach

Migrating 200,000 orders and customers

Zala has a vast order history — we explored migrating 4 years worth, but that would have been more than 1 million orders, so we did 1.5 years instead. This was still a feat of 200,000 orders and their associated customers.

To reduce the time it took to run the migration, we handled requests in parallel to max out our API rate limits.

Approach

Remapping 2,000 products and variants

We also used our custom middleware to migrate more than 2,000 SKUs, along with their media and international prices.

We remapped and transferred different product groups into Shopify, and though we weren’t able to leverage Shopify’s combined listings due to database limitations, we found a different way to meet Zala’s needs.

In Shopify, variants are different versions of a single parent product and are listed under the same product page. Instead, we used unique product pages for their variants, but made it so that customers can still select variant lengths or colours, which will seamlessly transfer them to that product page.

Thanks to Zala’s well-organized SKUs, we were able to reverse-engineer their SKU structure to identify product connections and establish them in the database before transferring them, which allowed us to build proper relationships between them in Shopify. We leveraged Shopify’s metaobjects as a container to link the product collections, ensuring that they were discoverable without being true variants.

Approach

Designing Zala’s conversion-focused storefront

We designed a fully custom storefront focused on improving conversions by creating a more intuitive experience for users and driving returning behaviour.

We also made improvements to their analytics and attribution. Using Shopify Markets, we maintained currency conversion and other localized features, and helped unify multiple Zala teams for more streamlined operations.

We integrated Zendesk to enable their colour match service, where the user fills out a form and submits pictures to get recommended products that match their hair colour.

Conclusion

Launching the Zala Hair site on Shopify was an exciting and complex migration and redesign that we were thrilled to lead.

Shopify was a great fit to help them unify their storefronts and will allow them to easily expand to other markets. In establishing Shopify architecture for Zala, we ensured they could use it as a reference to migrate more BIG brands to their platform and create unified experiences across their businesses.

We loved helping BIG and Zala move their data to a new platform and creating custom middleware to make sure it was done right and fast. The redesign was an amazing transformation for their brand, and we can’t wait to see where they take it next!

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