I previously wrote about some surprises migrating multiple Xero Shoes WooCommerce sites over to Shopify.
That post focused on the myths about Shopify and how some things that work really well in WooCommerce don’t quite translate to Shopify.
This post looks at the flipside: the expected changes that turned out to be enormous wins for Xero Shoes. 💪
From server reliability and instant reporting to a fast, usable admin, Shopify removed whole categories of work that used to consume developer, marketing, and customer service attention. 👇
The Benefits of Shopify
Benefit #1: Forget About Server Performance
If you're a developer you might be familiar with the anxiety right before a large launch or sale. If you didn't write the code correctly the site could crash when thousands of customers arrive at the same time.
Our developer team used to share HOLD gifs when we were on WooCommerce. Yes we handled large sales that had back-to-back million dollar days all handled in WooCommerce. So WooCommerce can do this… but that doesn't mean it's easy. Or without stress.
To ensure server reliability we had to be painfully specific with Marketing. We'd ask in advance (and repeatedly) how many emails they were sending, when they were sending them, and how long we can spread out the delivery to reduce the load on our server.
With Shopify, this 👆 is work we no longer have to do. 🎉
That's the best case outcome for a platform migration. As an engineer I shouldn’t care when the emails go out. Send 1 email or send 500. It should make no difference on my day to day.
Not having to worry about server performance certainly relieves stress. It also unlocks the ability to forecast email effectiveness. Within 2 hours of an email going out we have enough signal to estimate the daily traffic.
We actually did this for BFCM. A few times throughout the weekend we noticed an email wasn’t delivering and we sent another email or text that afternoon.
If you're worried about server performance and dripping your email out over 4 hours. The earliest you could measure if an email is working is around ~6 hours. You lose the ability to pivot and send an email within the same day.
And all of this is enabled by Shopify servers so you don't have to worry about crashing.
I used to worry about server performance which meant relentlessly hounding and restricting marketing. Marketing no longer has to change their process because of developer concerns. I’m free to use my brain power on other parts of the business. And we have timely data unlocking the ability to pivot and maximize the sales window.
Benefit #2: Phenomenal Reporting
One of the weakest areas of self-hosted e-commerce software is reporting. You don't want the same server that serves customers webpages to also process huge database queries. Either you're going to have a slow website or slow reporting… or both.
That's why we used Metorik for WooCommerce. It's a fantastic reporting platform that lets marketers, finance, customer service, etc do as much searching & generating reports as they want without affecting our site.
With Shopify you can use their built-in reporting. You don't need to pay for extra services.
And best of all it’s easy enough to use that you don't need a data scientist to generate reports.
The AI in the Shopify reporting section is insanely good.
To give an example from this week, I was on a call with a vendor who wanted to know the revenue breakdown by country in the EU. I didn’t have this data handy but I wrote a natural question in Shopify’s reporting. I had the answer 2 minutes later.
This isn’t limited to me. Anyone on the team can now answer data questions in the moment while the conversation is still happening.
Reporting used to be asynchronous, specialized, and delayed. Now it’s immediate and available to whoever’s in the room.
Benefit #3: An Admin Designed to be Used
One of the most embarrassing parts of our WooCommerce site was how SLLLLOOOOOWWWWW the admin loaded. 🙈
It's not that you can't speed up the WooCommerce backend. It's that it's not customer facing. So no one advocates for it.
- Loading default products screen takes 28 seconds
- Loading recent orders takes 13 seconds
- Loading a specific order takes 12 seconds
If you spread this out over a CS team with a dozen people it really adds up.
It's not just the total amount of wasted loading time. It's about stepping over an attention threshold.
If a task takes a few seconds I can stay focused. As soon as a page takes 10+ seconds to load I’m going to start opening new tabs and working on multiple tickets (or just open social media).
This isn’t just intuition. Productivity research as early as the 1960s and reproduced in 1993 & 2010 by Jakob Nielsen shows that 10 seconds is the point where users lose attention and start thinking about other things.
10 seconds keeps the user's attention. From 1–10 seconds, users definitely feel at the mercy of the computer and wish it was faster, but they can handle it. After 10 seconds, they start thinking about other things, making it harder to get their brains back on track once the computer finally does respond.
Slow admin pages nudge humans to context switch. You’ll use dozens of tabs, there will be half finished tasks, and you’ll probably forget why you opened a specific tab. That’s the downside of context switching. The WooCommerce admin is so slow we change our own process to compensate for the slow system.
For teams doing operational work, sustained focus is how work actually gets completed. When pages take 3 seconds to load you can enter a period of sustained focus. You can't enter flow if you're waiting 12+ seconds between pages. You'll inevitably get distracted by a DM, email, or other task breaking your focus and slowing productivity..
One of the best things about Shopify is how fast the admin is.
- Loading default products screen takes 3 seconds
- Loading recent orders takes 3 seconds
- Loading a specific order takes 3 seconds
The Shopify admin is designed for task completion. It's designed so you can mono-task. Complete a task start to finish and move onto the next item on your list. Admin speed determines whether work is completed sequentially or fragmented across dozens of half-finished states.
Conclusion
I was prepared (and excited) for site reliability from Shopify. That saves engineers like myself some grey hairs.
But looking at all of these benefits together I’m struck that Shopify removed whole categories of work:
- Devs had to manage marketing email sends
- Data questions required special training
- CS agents were fighting human nature just to get their work done
WooCommerce can do all of these, but the default is slower with more interdepartmental coordination.
Shopify isn’t necessarily better at e-commerce but it lets us spend more time actually doing e-commerce.
