Case Study: Migrating Ice Barrel to Shopify

Ice Barrel 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.

The starting point

WooCommerce had gotten them through the early years. Flexible, customizable, fine for a small team that needed to move fast.

By the time we were prepping the Ice Barrel 500 and the 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.

The proposal

I 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.

The Chiller's public sale was the forcing function.

Migration

We 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.

We launched the Chiller's public sale on the new store.

Results

• Conversion rate up 165% vs. the prior weeks
• Weekly traffic up 200%, no performance degradation
• Weekly revenue up 300%
• Cart abandonment down 10-15 percentage points
• Email CTR up ~20%, email-driven revenue share nearly doubled
• Mobile conversion up 200%
• Average page load time down 40%
• Chiller launch beat the previous best by 150% on first-week volume
• Zero checkout downtime through the cutover

They got a store that held through the launch, and a team that could keep running it.