Case Study: A Successful WooCommerce to Shopify Migration For This Australian Tactical & Outdoor Brand

TL;DR

• Swanky supported Valhalla Tactical with an ecommerce migration from WooCommerce to Shopify.
• We implemented custom solutions to ensure compliance with state-specific product restrictions and security regulations.
• Automation was leveraged to reduce manual tasks and increase backend efficiency.
• We recommended and implemented a comprehensive Shopify tech stack to meet current and long-term business requirements.
• Post-migration, there has been a significant improvement in website performance, with Core Web Vitals notably increasing.
• Year-on-year comparisons also reveal a 65% increase in average session duration, a 95% uplift to conversion rate, and a 362% increase in revenue.

Valhalla Tactical: Business overview

Valhalla Tactical sells an extensive range of military, first responder and outdoor gear – from slingshots and sleeping bags to backpacks and boots. This proud Australian retailer boasts over 200 collections, including its own-brand product range, as well as products from a number of third-party brands.

An omnichannel business, Valhalla operates both online and offline, with brick-and-mortar locations in Brisbane, Townsville, Darwin and Canberra. It sells across Australia, as well as shipping internationally to Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, the US, and Papua New Guinea.

Successful WooCommerce to Shopify migration

Frustrated with having to navigate frequent downtime on their unreliable WooCommerce website, the Valhalla team sought a more stable, dependable ecommerce platform that could support their brand now, and in the future.

A reliable solution that services over 640 million shoppers worldwide and boasts 99.99% average uptime, Shopify was a compelling choice for the team. Compared to WooCommerce, Shopify has a 36% better total cost of ownership and a 17% higher checkout conversion rate, as well as a significantly larger and more reliable app ecosystem.

Our Brisbane Shopify experts leveraged Swanky’s tried and tested ecommerce replatforming process to move the Valhalla online store from WooCommerce to Shopify. This ecommerce migration included the transfer of 3,200 products, 200+ collections, historical orders, blogs, 301s and content pages (e.g. about us, FAQ, and contact us).

We customised a Shopify 2.0 theme, creating a bold, modern site with clean layout and on-brand outdoor aesthetic. The chosen theme supports visual storytelling through high-impact imagery and video, allowing the Valhalla team to showcase their products in action.

Meanwhile, the powerful search function allows customers to quickly and easily navigate Valhalla’s large product catalogue, reducing frustration for high-intent shoppers.

When it comes to performance, the Valhalla Shopify store is rapid and responsive – perfect for a military and outdoor brand whose mission is to help their customers excel.

Sharing her reflections on the new site, Stephany Gore, General Manager at Valhalla Tactical, commented:

“Improvements to our conversion rate were instant as soon as we launched the site. Many customers have commented on the ease of use and speed of the site, as is evident by the increase in our average daily sales.

“Plus, we no longer experience frequent outages and downtime.”

Implementing state-based product restrictions

Several products across Valhalla’s collections are prohibited in certain Australian states, and cannot legally be sold. For example, slingshots and associated products are banned in New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria, yet are permitted in Queensland, Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania.

We therefore implemented a state selector pop-up that appears when a user enters the Valhalla site.

Once a user selects their state, any products that are prohibited in that particular location will automatically be hidden from collection pages, predictive search suggestions, and search results. If a user somehow lands on the product page of a banned product, the Add to Cart button will be hidden.

Furthermore, if a shopper was to select one state on the pop-up, but enter a shipping address in a different state at the checkout, the order will automatically be put on hold for Valhalla staff to review.

Leveraging Shopify Flow to authenticate security licenses

In addition to adhering to state-based product restrictions, Valhalla must also verify security licences for certain products on their store.

These products are tagged with “licence-required” in the Shopify admin. Upon checkout, an automated flow will notify the Valhalla admin team, who will then contact the individual to confirm their security licence before the order can be shipped.

This was previously a fully manual process in WooCommerce.

Mission-based merchandising using variant metafields

With a large product inventory, it’s crucial to streamline the path to purchase for online shoppers, helping them find the most suitable products for their needs as smoothly as possible.

One way that we helped achieve this on the Valhalla site is by allowing customers to shop by ‘Mission’ (e.g. Military, First Responder) and view appropriately-coloured product variants (e.g. brown and camo variants for Military and black for First Responder).

This solution leverages Shopify’s native metafield functionality. In the Shopify Admin, product variants are assigned one of four preset options in the Customer Group variant metafield: Military, Emergency, Outdoor, or Training. A brown-coloured boot would be tagged with Military, for example, whilst a black variant would be tagged with Emergency.

When a customer clicks on the Military collection on the frontend, the resulting view is filtered to only display product variants tagged with the Military customer group metafield. In this case, they would only see brown and camo variants on the collection page.

Similarly, when shopping by First Responder mission, users will only see black product variants on the collection page.

This solution is supported by the Shopify Search & Discovery app. The automatic filtration makes it easy for shoppers to browse products that meet their colour/pattern requirements – supporting product discovery and improving the overall on-site experience.

Shopify tech stack consultation

We advised on a suitable tech stack to support Valhalla’s current and long-term needs. Alongside Shopify, the brand’s new digital ecosystem includes:

• Klaviyo for meaningfully connecting with customers via email.

• Okendo for capturing and displaying customer reviews to build consumer trust and allow the creation of UGC (user generated content).

• Gorgias to provide high-quality customer support across all inbound customer enquiry channels.

• Loop Returns, an automated post-purchase tool that allows the seamless management of self-service customer returns.

• Starshipit for implementing shipping rules, integrating with a variety of couriers and delivering a smooth shipping experience.

• Shopify Search & Discovery to power search functionality, collection page filters and product recommendations.

• Littledata for server-side analytics implementation, providing more accurate reporting across Meta, Google Analytics and Google Ads – allowing improved customer and revenue tracking.

• Shopjar for customer-to-customer referrals.

• SEO Manager for monitoring the site’s SEO health and making data-driven decisions to improve store visibility in organic search results.

Results

An improvement in store performance

Valhalla’s WooCommerce to Shopify migration has unlocked a significant improvement in website performance.

Pre-migration, the site’s pages were consistently failing Lighthouse’s Core Web Vitals Assessment, whereas on Shopify, all the pages we tested passed the assessment on both desktop and mobile.

The biggest improvements we recorded in our post-migration testing were on the homepage, where the Lighthouse performance score increased by 141% on desktop and 97% on mobile.

This improvement is underscored by improvements in all key Core Web Vitals metrics following the migration to Shopify. For example, on the desktop homepage:

• ‘First Contentful Paint’ halved
• ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ decreased by 69%
• ‘Total Blocking Time’ was down by 91%
• ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ reduced by two thirds
• ‘Speed Index’ decreased by 75%

These results indicate faster page loading time since moving from WooCommerce to Shopify.

Uplift in key metrics

We also observed an increase in key metrics when comparing online store performance in the month after Valhalla’s WooCommerce to Shopify migration with the same period the year before.

For example, there has been:

• a 45% increase in sessions;
• a 61% increase in average session duration;
• a 95% boost to conversion rate;
• a 383% uplift in number of transactions; and
• a 362% increase in purchase revenue.

This could be the result of the improved website performance noted above, as faster loading times typically lead to a more positive on-site user experience, longer session times and more conversions.

Discussing these commercial improvements, General Manager Stephany Gore said:

“Swanky’s help with migrating our ecommerce store from WooCommerce to Shopify has been instrumental in driving substantial business growth for us. The migration not only provided a more reliable and stable platform but also delivered tangible improvements across multiple business metrics. 

“As a business we felt the impact of the project immediately and we are extremely happy with the new website. Since the launch of our new website, the site broke the record online store revenue for February in just 10 days, then again in March.”

More organic traffic

An 8% increase in organic website sessions was recorded when comparing the four week period after launching on Shopify with the same period the year before. This may be the result of improved SEO features and marketing tools in Shopify 2.0, compared to WooCommerce.

Working with Swanky: Client reflection

Reflecting on her experience of working with our Australian team, Stephany commented:

“Dealing with the team at Swanky was great. They were very professional, friendly and demonstrated excellent problem solving that made this project as smooth and as successful as possible.

“Their customer service was also really great, the whole team came to visit us in person at the start of the project and launch date. Sean also took the time to visit us in Brisbane numerous times whenever we felt we needed an in-person meeting. 

“We really enjoyed working with Namira, Jess and Sean and would highly recommend them to anyone looking to convert to Shopify. I can’t speak more highly of them!”

What happens next?

We look forward to our continued collaboration with the Valhalla team, helping them optimise their omnichannel operations with Shopify POS, improve customer retention, and explore Shopify B2B.

Explore the Valhalla Tactical Shopify store.

Get expert guidance for your WooCommerce to Shopify migration

A leading Shopify Platinum Partner for Australian brands, we proudly support retailers in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and beyond. We provide end-to-end support for our clients, launching them on Shopify and providing data-driven commerce services to accelerate growth.

To discuss any of the themes in this case study, including ecommerce replatforming, automation with Shopify Flow, or tech stack consultation, please get in touch with our friendly solutions team.