Southern Harvest

After establishing a successful plant seed stall at Salamanca Market in Hobart, Southern Harvest’s owner decided to expand his market with an online store. Before the age of Shopify, the developers he hired developed a custom ecommerce website using Drupal. By 2024 this had become very successful, with customers in the tens-of-thousands across Australia.

While the Drupal site served the business well for many years, it wasn’t a platform built for online sales. Nor is it a platform that is friendly to operate and update without being technical. The owner had a number of ambitions which only a platform like Shopify would be able to satisfy:

• The ability to autonomously update the site without paying software developers
• Access to the most modern marketing and SEO techniques
• Being able to take payments using the newest, most popular methods
• Better control over customer funnels and the checkout process

The company’s custom email and domain hosting was also tightly integrated into the website infrastructure, and needed to be migrated elsewhere so the owner could have more direct control.

The Plan

We collaborated with the owner and planned a staged migration over a number of months. This would ensure his store would not go offline at any point, avoiding lost sales. It also meant the work could take place during the quietest period of the year, to further minimise any disruptions. Having a well-defined plan also allowed the owner to coordinate the process with the outgoing vendor himself and avoid any bill shock.

We organised the work into stages:

1. Email and DNS migration. As these services can operate independently of the website platform, we tackled this first. First, Getbusi assisted with setting up a Microsoft 365 for Business account, choosing an ideal DNS registrar and host. Then used Microsoft’s tools to migrate about a decade of business emails over.

2. Shopify setup. There’s a fair bit to deal with on any new Shopify store. Setting up shipping and inventory rules. Selecting a premium theme. Integrating the brand elements. Laying out page templates. The original website also had a handful of advanced features we needed to replicate like a dynamic What to Sow Now widget.

3. Migration tools. All online stores are changing constantly, so you can’t just export a snapshot of the data at one point and be done. You need a repeatable process to be able to do intermediate and final migrations. Getbusi achieved this using some purpose-built data transformation scripts. These could take the Drupal-exported products, customers and collections and convert them to the formats Shopify requires. This also had to take into account URLs, page redirects and SEO metadata so as not to affect search rankings.

4. Testing and tailoring. With an initial version of the Shopify site in place, the owner set about testing it. The goal was to keep the site familiar to loyal customers, but also take advantage of the new techniques and tools afforded by their premium theme. Getbusi also worked directly with Southern Harvest’s preferred SEO consultant to get some finer details right.

5. Final migration & launch. With all the elements signed off and ready, the owner selected a launch date, a several-week buffer ahead of their busy season. On the day, Getbusi simply flipped the necessary switches in DNS and Shopify, and the new site was live without disruption.

The Outcome

As of writing this, the new site has been live for over 6 months. Business has continued as normal but now with many more growth strategies available. The owner has updated the site a number of times and rarely needs to contact Getbusi for anything.

Testimonial

"James & Dan at Getbusi were fantastic at helping us transfer our old website and online store over to Shopify. Very professional and helpful in the transfer. They were also able to suggest improvements on the site and able to create some specific requests that we had for our new site. Highly recommend them : )"