General Pants partnered with ThinkLab to migrate from Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) to Shopify Plus, creating a more agile and scalable ecommerce platform. By simplifying platform architecture, improving operational efficiency, and leveraging Shopify's extensive ecosystem, the retailer achieved lower costs, faster performance, and greater flexibility for future growth.
This SFCC to Shopify Plus migration case study highlights the strategy, challenges, and outcomes behind the transformation.
On SFCC, the retailer had:
While the Salesforce Commerce Cloud implementation supported the retailer's complex ecommerce requirements, the platform had become increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain. As business requirements evolved, even small changes often required significant development effort, creating bottlenecks for marketing, merchandising, and operational teams.
Despite supporting a sophisticated ecommerce operation, Salesforce Commerce Cloud introduced growing operational and development challenges. Over time, the total cost of ownership increased while the speed of innovation slowed, making it harder for the business to respond to changing customer and market demands.
Despite skilled teams and continuous training, maintaining and evolving the platform became financially and operationally unsustainable.
After investing in Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the retailer conducted a strategic review of its ecommerce platform. The objective was to determine whether continued investment in SFCC would deliver sufficient long-term value compared to modern ecommerce platforms such as Shopify Plus.
In an internal review, leadership acknowledged:
At the same time, Shopify Plus offered:
The decision was made to stop extending SFCC and fully rebuild on Shopify Plus.
A key concern in abandoning SFCC was integration risk, particularly around the existing Apparel21 (AP21) ERP.
Zimble.io played a pivotal role by:
Because Zimble already powered complex ERP integrations and business logic, the retailer was able to change commerce platforms without re-engineering core systems.
Beyond integration continuity, Zimble.io enabled advanced functionality that exceeded what had been possible on SFCC without heavy customisation, including:
This ensured Shopify Plus was not a “step down” from SFCC, but a more flexible and extensible commerce layer supported by a powerful integration backbone.
After evaluating the long-term costs, complexity, and scalability of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the retailer selected Shopify Plus as the foundation for its future ecommerce growth. The decision was driven by Shopify Plus's ability to deliver enterprise ecommerce functionality with lower operational overhead, faster deployment cycles, and a significantly lower total cost of ownership.
Shopify Plus selected over Salesforce Commerce Cloud due to lower total cost of ownership and faster ecommerce delivery
Key reasons for choosing Shopify Plus:
Based on projected implementation, support, and operational costs, Shopify Plus was expected to deliver approximately 40% lower Year 1 Build and Run costs compared to maintaining and extending the existing Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform.
Once the migration was completed, the impact was immediate and measurable.
On SFCC, checkout logic was heavily customised.
Customers could reach checkout only to discover:
This led to cart abandonment and frustration.
With Shopify Plus:
Customers now see only valid options, reducing friction and drop-offs.
Adding a new payment method often meant:
This slowed expansion into new markets.
On Shopify Plus:
This allowed the retailer to serve new customer segments instantly, including international and student markets.
Page performance was impacted due to:
This resulted in slower page load times, especially on mobile, affecting user experience and SEO.
After moving to Shopify Plus, the retailer:
As a result, the site achieved almost twice the speed compared to SFCC.
Faster performance led to:
Inventory management across regions involved:
This required constant manual monitoring and intervention, making global inventory management complex and error-prone.
Managing inventory across countries was previously complex and error prone.
With Shopify Plus, the retailer achieved:
What previously required constant manual oversight became largely automated.
The same product had to be created multiple times for different regions. Three regions meant three separate product entries.
With Shopify Plus:
This reduced duplication, errors, and admin workload.
On SFCC, business agility was limited due to:
As a result, even small business changes often took weeks or months to implement.
With Shopify Plus:
The business could now adapt in days instead of months.
On SFCC, sales and marketing initiatives were constrained by:
As a result, marketing teams were dependent on developers, slowing campaign execution and experimentation.
With Shopify Plus, the retailer gained greater control and autonomy:
This empowered marketing teams to move faster and operate independently, launching and optimizing campaigns without waiting on development cycles.
On SFCC, adopting new technologies involved:
This made future innovation slower, cost-intensive, and less scalable.
With Shopify Plus, the retailer is positioned for continuous innovation:
The platform ensures the business can adopt emerging technologies seamlessly, without the need for another replatforming in the future.
This SFCC to Shopify Plus migration was not just a technical upgrade — it was a strategic reset.
Zimble.io was critical in making the transition seamless, low-risk, and operationally stable, while also unlocking advanced commerce functionality beyond what SFCC delivered.
For this international apparel retailer, Shopify Plus—powered by Zimble.io—proved that simpler platforms, when paired with the right integration layer, can outperform heavily customized enterprise stacks.