{"kind":"doc","doc":{"title":"Case Study: Migrating Ice Barrel to Shopify","section":{"slug":"posts","name":"Posts"},"rkey":"1728582380556-case-study-ice-barrel","cid":"bafkreic2o55w6gqi73crdqcvg2g2xd7lbetfkgybej6e44dh5uiuowdpt4","renderKey":"bafkreic2o55w6gqi73crdqcvg2g2xd7lbetfkgybej6e44dh5uiuowdpt4@2024-10-10T09:00:00Z@2026-08-24T23:48:21Z@Posts|","href":"/posts/1728582380556-case-study-ice-barrel","publishedAt":"2024-10-10T09:00:00Z","updatedAt":"2026-08-24T23:48:21Z","tags":["e-commerce","platform-migration","shopify","cold-therapy","case-study","conversion-optimization","analytics"],"description":"Ice Barrel moved from WooCommerce to Shopify in under two months, lifting conversion 165% while handling a major product launch without checkout downtime.","readingMinutes":2,"markdown":"# Case Study: Migrating Ice Barrel to Shopify\n\n[Ice Barrel](https://icebarrel.com/) was growing fast in cold therapy and the WooCommerce store was running out of headroom. I contracted in for product marketing and analytics, working with the remote dev team on the existing platform, and led the migration to Shopify from the proposal through cutover.\n\n## The starting point\n\nWooCommerce had gotten them through the early years. Flexible, customizable, fine for a small team that needed to move fast.\n\nBy the time we were prepping the [Ice Barrel 500](https://icebarrel.com/products/ice-barrel-500) and the [Ice Barrel Chiller](https://icebarrel.com/products/ice-barrel-chiller), the cracks were obvious: shaky attribution, a brittle analytics setup, scaling concerns ahead of a major launch, slow deploys, and a codebase that was hard to maintain.\n\n## The proposal\n\nI made the case for Shopify: growth modeling against the new platform, a look at what comparable brands were running, and a working theme demo. Shopify won because the infrastructure would hold, the app ecosystem covered the gaps, and the team could run it after I left.\n\nThe Chiller's public sale was the forcing function.\n\n## Migration\n\nWe scoped six months and shipped in just under two. Every customer, order, and product moved clean. I rebuilt the storefront, refactored the workflows, wrote the docs, and trained the team so they could run it without me.\n\nWe launched the Chiller's public sale on the new store.\n\n## Results\n\n- Conversion rate up 165% vs. the prior weeks\n- Weekly traffic up 200%, no performance degradation\n- Weekly revenue up 300%\n- Cart abandonment down 10-15 percentage points\n- Email CTR up ~20%, email-driven revenue share nearly doubled\n- Mobile conversion up 200%\n- Average page load time down 40%\n- Chiller launch beat the previous best by 150% on first-week volume\n- Zero checkout downtime through the cutover\n\nThey got a store that held through the launch, and a team that could keep running it.\n","media":{},"series":{},"related":[{"title":"Case Study: Rebuilding Opul on Framer","href":"/posts/1709280000000-case-study-revance-opul","section":"posts","description":"A two-month WordPress-to-Framer migration that gave Opul's team control of the site and lifted new-customer demo conversion 50% over projections.","publishedAt":"2024-03-01T16:19:00Z"},{"title":"Scalability → Buildability","href":"/posts/1739212426700-scalability-buildability","section":"posts","description":"A system scales internally when each feature leaves behind primitives that make the next one easier to build.","publishedAt":"2025-02-10T10:33:00Z"},{"title":"Case study: Aspiration's CRM platform","href":"/posts/1625156340000-case-study-aspiration","section":"posts","description":"Two years running CRM and lifecycle at Aspiration. A platform migration, first-party analytics, and campaigns that lifted lead conversion 53%.","publishedAt":"2021-07-01T09:19:00Z"},{"title":"Onchain Analytics","href":"/experiments/1791937789859-onchain-analytics","section":"experiments","description":"A homebrew analytics experiment: keccak256 session hashes and page-view counts recorded onchain on Base Sepolia.","publishedAt":"2024-04-05T15:01:44Z"},{"title":"Datamosh","href":"/art/1791519648658-datamosh","section":"art","description":"An iOS app","publishedAt":"2026-10-09T04:20:51Z"},{"title":"Own The Means of Cognition","href":"/posts/1789494942000-own-the-means-of-cognition","section":"posts","description":"Own the means of cognition and you don't need a ministry of truth, the modal in everyone's pocket does the job.","publishedAt":"2026-10-02T02:01:14Z"}],"prev":{"title":"Generate a new private key","href":"/posts/1712432046964-generate-a-new-private-key"},"next":{"title":"Shitposting Towards a Pizza Oven","href":"/posts/1731475962422-shitposting-towards-a-pizza-oven"}}}