Changing 4GOLD for the better: From WooCommerce to Shopify

4GOLD doesn’t go for silver, so WooCommerce didn’t cut it. In this case study, you’ll learn why migrating platforms was a step 4GOLD had to take in order to manage their growth and business needs. A big issue 4GOLD faced was caused by failing WooCommerce plugins. Outdated and conflicted plugins led to data-losses, crashes and security issues. They even had troubles with tracking simple things like conversion rate.

4GOLD who?

In case you’re not familiar with the brand yet: the company develops high quality sports nutrition and supplements based on your personal DNA sequence. Futuristic? A bit. Based on science? Very much so! Feel free to have a look yourself on their website.

Behind the company are some well-known sports names: professional cyclist Mathieu Van der Poel, former cyclist Brent Luyckx and motocrosser Axel Roelants. Thanks to this team, 4GOLD has the network and firepower to run an international webshop. Their hunger for success reaches farther than the tracks. In order to accommodate their growing audience, they partnered up with dear digital.

Despite their high quality products and international reach, there were challenges for 4GOLD to reach their potential. From front-end to back-end, from design to development, there was room for improvement.

The challenge

The main issues included a slow and cumbersome backend, making it difficult to work efficiently. The platform was not user-friendly, complicating the process of making adjustments. Additionally, accessing vital metrics like conversion rates required extra plugins, adding to the complexity. The platform became too technical for easy customisation, and the limited support offered did not meet their needs. These issues highlighted WooCommerce's limitations in scalability and adaptability, prompting 4GOLD to seek a more suitable solution to support their growth and operational efficiency.

The scalable solution

Note: This migration dates from 2021, and Shopify hasn’t been idle. Some of the upgrades we did were state-of-the-art back then, but pretty standard right now. Shopify Markets for example was launched in 2021. The revolutionary thing about it comes down to this: all your different stores' front-ends could be combined in one back-end, which is extremely convenient for brands. With Markets, you don’t have to bother making different versions of your shop, all running on subdomains and thus basically running multiple webshops at once. Everything is brought together in a single back-end.

This was particularly interesting for brands such as 4GOLD, because it enabled them to scale up their webshop quicker, with less effort. It obviously takes money, time and effort to expand your webshop to different countries, but thanks to Shopify Markets, you can launch in different countries and continents relatively quickly and easily. And that does wonders for sales, because it allows brands to tailor customer experiences based on location.

5 things we love about Shopify Markets

1. 1. It enables different currencies

2. 2. There’s native translations

3. 3. You won’t ruin your SEO

4. 4. It will automatically adjust VAT

5. 5. You can have B2C and B2B in one place

The result

Who better than Brent Luyckx, one of the founders, to talk us through the results.

“Both the front-end and the back-end are way faster and more responsive. Shopify’s dashboards give us access to all the data we need in no time. Furthermore, it’s way easier to add or change products. We saw a significant increase in conversion rates from the moment we launched on Shopify. We couldn’t be happier!” Do you want to be as happy as Brent?