DYODE moved Active Ride Shop from Magento to Shopify

Active Ride Shop is a skate, surf and snow retailer with its own stores, its own Active-brand clothing, socks and decks, and a long list of skate brands. Its online store ran on Magento, tied to an order management system and the stores' merchandising system.

Moving to Shopify meant carrying the catalog, customer accounts and order history across without breaking the systems behind them. Years later, Active Ride Shop came back for an outside look: the store and its marketing had drifted, and the team wanted a plan.

DYODE co-founder Tim Katz led E-Commerce at Active Ride Shop, and DYODE consulted on the online business. That included choosing Shopify and running the move off Magento. DYODE moved Active Ride Shop's products, customers and orders off Magento and onto Shopify. We connected Shopify to the order management system and the stores' merchandising system, so prices, inventory, orders and returns kept flowing between the website, the warehouse and the stores.

Before the switch, we tested gift cards, Amazon Pay and PayPal end to end, mapped 301 redirects from the old URLs, and set up shipping to the US and Canada. We kept the old Magento store running on a subdomain so open orders could finish.

DYODE switched the store over at midnight. We sent account activation emails to existing customers, submitted sitemaps to Google and Bing, and pointed ad, affiliate and email links at the new store.

We rebuilt the welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, birthday and anniversary emails for Shopify, imported the product reviews, and redirected pages that returned 404 errors to new URLs as they turned up.

Later, Active Ride Shop brought DYODE back for a two-month audit and strategy engagement. We reviewed operations, every marketing channel, the brand and the website, and tested site speed against ten competitors, from Zumiez and Tilly's to single-door skate shops.

The audit found two big problems. The Shopify theme was poorly coded, with broken navigation and a broken cart, and averaged 35 out of 100 for speed on mobile. And the brand had lost the clear voice it once had in skate.

We recommended moving to Shopify's Dawn theme rather than patching the old one, removing apps the store no longer needed, and rebuilding email on Klaviyo with SMS brought back alongside it.

For the brand, we wrote a core of Active Body, Active Mind and Active Soul, and six shopper profiles, from new teenage skaters to parents shopping for their kids. The roadmap ran in three phases: fix the foundation, get ready for the holidays, then refine and grow.

DYODE moved Active Ride Shop off Magento onto Shopify with its catalog, customer accounts and order history carried over, redirects in place, and its order management and store systems still connected.

When the brand came back years later, the audit gave its leadership a clear account of what was broken, from a failing theme to a brand that had lost its voice, and a phased plan to fix the store and its marketing.