Blue Vanilla is a London womenswear brand. They ship internationally and have run concessions in stores such as New Look and House of Fraser. Swanky published the write-up on 28 May 2019. Hannah Smiddy wrote it. This is an agency case study.
Lucy Colgrave, then Head of Ecommerce Growth and Digital Marketing, is the client voice. They left a WordPress site with WooCommerce for Shopify Plus. The new store went live on 25 April 2019.
If you are looking at the same route, start with the WooCommerce → Shopify playbook. Shopify’s WooCommerce guide is the generic path. Blue Vanilla’s published story is about speed and who can edit the site, not about a product CSV.
Why they left WooCommerce
Lucy said the main reasons were site speed and bounce rate. The store was outdated and very slow. Average page load sat above 7 seconds. Bounce sat around 60 to 70%, sometimes higher.
Simple changes needed a developer. Fast fashion with new styles arriving often cannot wait on a ticket for a banner or a filter.
They looked at Magento, BigCommerce, Wix, GoDaddy, and Shopify. Shopify won on features, flow, and support. Fashion Nova, Gymshark, and Kylie Cosmetics were the reference stores they named.
The page does not publish a WooCommerce hosting bill or a Shopify Plus license, so I am not quoting a cost cut.
What Swanky rebuilt
This was a redesign plus a platform move. Swanky migrated the existing store and designed a new theme around large images, a shop-the-look hotspot, a shoppable Instagram feed, and new collection filters.
They moved search in the header so it was easier to find. They replaced drop-down filters with button-select filters and colour swatches. Those are storefront choices, not WooCommerce export columns.
Shopify’s current WooCommerce docs are blunter than the case study. Products and customers can move with the Store Migration app or a CSV. Product images pull from URLs, so the old store has to stay online during import. Products with more than three options need a redesign. Customer passwords do not come across. Historical orders and reviews need a third-party app. Coupons, blog posts, and WordPress pages are not in the WooCommerce product export. Plugins and the theme stay behind.
Swanky does not list which of those they imported. Lucy’s quotes are about the new admin and the launch day, not about order history.
Launch day
They expected downtime and a round of test orders on every payment method. Orders arrived in minutes. An activation email produced a traffic spike and a strong weekend. A Swanky person sat with them on the day to point at what still needed work.
That is a useful launch note. The cutover was not a quiet maintenance window. They mailed people and took real orders the same day.
What they gained
A few weeks after launch, versus the same period just before it, Swanky published these comparisons:
- Average page load down 35%, from 6 seconds to 3.8 seconds
- Bounce rate down 25%
- Users up 18%, with the same lift in session duration
- Pages per session up 69%
Lucy had described the old site as above 7 seconds. The result table starts from 6 seconds. I am leaving both numbers as written. They are agency figures from 2019, measured over a short window.
Lucy liked the look, the path from browse to checkout, and an admin that felt less busy than WooCommerce. The analytics view of trending products, high-potential products, and products that needed work was new for them.
The team expected to spend time on marketing instead of WordPress maintenance. That is the operating claim. There is no year-two follow-up on the page.
What the agency page skips
Swanky does not publish a failed import, a missing customer password, or a refund that still lived on WooCommerce. Passwords do not migrate. If buyers used accounts, they needed Shopify’s one-time code or a reset.
SEO, redirects, and subscriptions are not in the story. The playbook treats plugins, theme, and WooCommerce Subscriptions as lost. You replace them with apps before you cut DNS.
The write-up is seven years old as I publish this. Shopify’s importer and customer-account model have changed since 2019. Use today’s docs for the mechanics. Use Lucy’s quotes for why a fashion team wanted off WooCommerce.
If you need to go back, the reverse playbook is Shopify → WooCommerce.
What I would copy
Measure page load and bounce on the old store before anyone designs a theme. Lucy already had those numbers. They are what made the first-weeks comparison possible.
Decide which WooCommerce extras you still need. Reviews, subscriptions, and blog posts each take a different importer. A product CSV is not a store.
Keep WooCommerce online until Shopify finishes pulling image URLs. Then place a real order, a refund, and an account sign-in before you send the activation email.
Have someone who knows both admins in the room on launch day. Blue Vanilla’s surprise was that orders showed up immediately. That is a good surprise only if checkout, tax, and shipping were already tested.
The WooCommerce → Shopify playbook is the checklist I would run. Use the Swanky write-up for the speed-and-ops case, and remember it is an agency page from 2019.