Muchachomalo's migration from Salesforce Commerce to Shopify Plus

When Dutch underwear brand Muchachomalo left Salesforce Commerce Cloud to migrate to Shopify Plus, they were amazed by the extreme user friendliness of Shopify Plus. And even more so by the fact that their new online store was launched two weeks before the deadline, without any bugs.

CLIENT

Muchachomalo

INDUSTRY

Fashion

TECHNOLOGY

Shopify plus webshops

PACKAGE

Webshop migration

Services we provided

Migration

Store Development

Optimizing for growth with Shopify Plus

Founded in 2007, Muchachomalo was one of the first brands in The Netherlands to offer trendy underwear for men. Its success was partly fueled by a miscommunication: instead of the requested 10.000, the first batch of products delivered by the manufacturer contained 100.000 items. Luckily, with the help of some effective guerilla marketing, there was a lot of demand for the unique prints and the rebellious image of Muchachomalo’s products.

Fast forward to 2024, and Muchachomalo is selling all across the globe, offline and online: retail, wholesale, on marketplaces, and of course through their own online store. Over the past few years the brand saw a consistent YoY growth of 20%. To prepare for further growth, last April they launched their new international e-commerce store on Shopify Plus, after migrating from Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

The disadvantages of Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Dylan van Gool, E-commerce Manager at Muchachomalo, explains the move: “When our contract with Salesforce Commerce Cloud was about to end, they made us an offer to also start using Salesforce Sales & Marketing Cloud. According to them, integrating the two platforms would be easy; ‘you only need a little bit of programming knowledge.’ When we checked that with our development agency, they had a very different message: it would cost at least 100.000 euros to integrate them well. That didn’t inspire a lot of trust, frankly.”

Combined with the doubts they already had about Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the choice to migrate away from the platform was an easy one. “Cost was an issue with Salesforce. Apart from the hefty yearly fee, around 60k, we needed developers for everything. Integrations with other platforms were particularly difficult, which we noticed when we switched from MailChimp to Spotler, for instance.”

→ Curious to know what Shopify Plus costs? Check out our blog on Shopify pricing

Meanwhile, Dylan kept seeing updates from Shopify on social media. “Wow, they just keep on innovating, don’t they! I had the impression that Shopify put a lot more energy into platform development than Salesforce did. At least with their Commerce platform, which seems to be of minor importance to them compared to their Sales & Marketing solution.”

Migrating to Shopify Plus with Code

At the time, Muchachomalo had already reached out to Code to discuss the possibility of a migration to Shopify Plus. When the offer from Salesforce turned out to be disappointing, the brand had to move relatively fast because of their contract expiring.

Code didn’t hesitate to commit to Muchachomalo’s non-negotiable deadline. We have a reputation for delivering within schedule and within budget, and are keen to keep it. Still, Dylan was impressed: “They finished the new store two weeks ahead of schedule. That took us by surprise, I have to say! After that we had to sort out a few last things, which they also fixed within the original deadline. And when we launched, everything worked perfectly right from the start.”

Higher conversion and SEO positions maintained

Although the new store has been online for less than three months at the time of writing, conversion is already higher than previous years. This didn’t surprise us at Code: a 2023 study of ecommerce conversion rates found that Shopify’s checkout converts 36% better than Salesforce’s. Dylan is especially pleased with the SEO results. “Our marketing agency expected a bigger setback from the migration, because that’s what they saw with other platform migrations. But we hardly lost any positions in Google.”

Overall, the collaboration with Code was a positive experience. “From the start we felt a good click. Every one or two weeks we got an update from Laura, our Project Manager at Code, and the team was quick to answer any questions we had.”

→ Looking to migrate your brand to Shopify as well? Check out these blogs:

Future plans

With the new store live, Muchachomalo is considering their next move. Dylan: “Where do we want to take our website, now that we’re on such a user friendly platform? There is a lot you can do by yourself in Shopify, and there are standard solutions available for so many integrations and features. Very refreshing, compared to Salesforce Commerce Cloud.”

At the top of their list is cross-border expansion, to Spain in particular. “Our focus is primarily on the Benelux at the moment, but Muchachomalo’s owner lives in Spain and has a lot of contacts there. We use Shopify Markets to cater to the different countries, currently The Netherlands and Belgium, Germany, Spain, and an English-language international version.”

→ Read more about selling internationally on Shopify here

In addition, Muchachomalo plans to explore the endless possibilities of apps like Rebuy and Klaviyo, which they implemented after the migration. “We started using Klaviyo about two weeks ago, so there is still a lot to figure out. But it is already opening up a whole new world for us. Compared to Spotler, our previous email marketing tool, it has a lot more features, offers more valuable data and personalization possibilities, and of course it integrates seamlessly with Shopify. This is going to take us to the next level in e-commerce.”

Plan your migration to Shopify

Are you curious about the benefits of Shopify for your company or considering an E-commerce platform switch?

Contact us directly - Code is an official Shopify Plus partner that can help you successfully replatform to Shopify.