Founded in 2015, Craft Cellars is a premium liquor retailer based in Calgary. Before turning to Bevy, it ran its online store on WooCommerce, with GlobalTill handling in-store point-of-sale. The two systems couldn't communicate with each other, which led to mismatched inventory sales data. The site was hard to shop, expensive to run, and prone to buckling during big product drops. Craft Cellars came to Bevy to migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify, fix the inventory mismatch issue, provide a better user experience for customers, and bring its growing number of stores onto one platform.
The Challenge: An Unstable Platform That Kept Running Into Issues
The Platforms Buckled and Fell Out of Sync
The WooCommerce setup was unstable and expensive to maintain. It strained during the high-traffic product drops Craft Cellars is known for. It also didn't connect well with other tools. Craft Cellars received inventory from its distributor, Liquor Connect, through the GlobalTill POS system, but the online store and the POS didn't sync in real time. The feed was often wrong, not just late. As a result, in-stock items showed as sold out, and sold-out items showed as available, leading to overselling and customers ordering unavailable products.
A Storefront With No Clear Way to Browse
Craft Cellars' old website made product discovery harder than it needed to be. With hundreds of items, finding a specific bottle took several clicks. Navigation didn't clearly indicate where to go for each category. Premium and top-shelf products, a key part of the business, were hard to find, too. The mobile UX was even worse. Without personalization, missing key components, and too much back-and-forth between pages, it couldn't help customers find what they wanted.
Siloed Data Opened the Door to Resellers
Customer and order data were spread across different platforms, with no single place to manage it. Resellers could buy limited and rare releases in bulk before regular customers could. Loyal customers were often left without the products they wanted.
Checkout Was Custom Built and Still Too Slow
No off-the-shelf app or plugin could handle shipping zones, rates, and taxes at checkout. To make checkout work the way a liquor retailer needed, Craft Cellars built it from scratch. Despite the custom build, checkout wasn't optimized for conversion, with too many steps and forms standing between a customer and a finished purchase.
Product Drops Gave Rise to Security Costs
Craft Cellars spent a lot to protect its site from bot attacks. The risk was higher during product drops, when exclusive releases brought more traffic and bot activity.
Three Stores Shared One Catalog and Inventory
Craft Cellars added two more pickup locations, but the website still treated all three stores as one. Each location had its own products, yet customers saw the same catalog no matter which store they shopped from. There was no way to check what was in stock at a specific location. If an item was sold out at one store, customers couldn't see if another location had it. They also didn't know which store would fulfill the order until they reached checkout.
A Pickup Store That Needed Its Own Identity
BIN905, the boutique shop Craft Cellars acquired in Calgary's Mission district, needed to run as its own pickup store with its own branding. Setting it up meant recreating everything the main store already had.
The Solution: Built on Shopify's Online Store 2.0 Theme and Top-Performing Checkout
A Full WooCommerce to Shopify Migration
We migrated Craft Cellars from WooCommerce to Shopify and built the new site on Online Store 2.0. The site now stays stable during traffic spikes, and the team can manage it day-to-day without relying on a developer. We connected Liquor Connect directly to Shopify, so inventory stays accurate and syncs in real time with the online store. We integrated Gorgias to support live chat on the storefront.
A Storefront Made for Easy Shopping
We redesigned the site for both mobile and desktop, starting with a mobile-first layout. The goal was to make the important parts of the shopping experience easy to reach, with key actions kept within a tap. We added predictive search, cross-sells, and upsells to help shoppers get to the right product without clicking through several pages. The new layout also gives limited releases more room to be seen while shoppers browse.
One Place for Customer and Order Data
We migrated customer, order, and inventory data from WooCommerce to Shopify. The team now has retail and online customer and order data in one place, along with a clearer view of inventory. This also helps prevent resellers from buying up limited releases before regular customers can.
Checkout Rebuilt for Speed and Compliance
We connected ShipStation to the new Shopify checkout so customers can choose how they want their order delivered and see the shipping cost right away. Taxes are auto-calculated based on the customer's location and what's in the order. We removed unnecessary fields and steps, so customers had less to fill out at checkout. For bottle deposits and other compliance requirements, Shopify Flow now handles the required steps during checkout.
Built-In Protection Against Attacks
Moving to Shopify puts fraud protection right into the platform, with tools like Fraud Analysis and Shopify Protect built in. These tools flag suspicious orders and credit card fraud, so Craft Cellars no longer pays for a separate security system to do the same job.
Shop by Location With Real-Time Stock
In our second engagement with Craft Cellars, after the initial migration, we built a location picker that pops up when a shopper visits the online store. It lets them choose between the main store on 32nd Avenue, Northland, and BIN905 and see the products available there. We also added a custom stock-out block that shows when an item is unavailable at a location and prompts shoppers to check another store. Behind the scenes, inventory filters and "stock-out" tags control which products appear based on each store's location and stock.
A Dedicated Pickup Location for BIN905
We cloned the main store's theme, products, apps, and metafields into a new BIN905 store. We then set it up as a pickup-only location in Shopify. BIN905 kept its identity without the team rebuilding the store from scratch.
"Working with Bevy on our migration from WooCommerce to Shopify has been a great experience. Our industry comes with a unique set of challenges, from complex rules and regulations to issues that don't always have a straightforward solution, and the Bevy team has consistently been available, responsive, and willing to troubleshoot alongside us. What we've appreciated most is their willingness to go beyond the scope of their role, supporting our small team wherever they can and helping us navigate challenges well outside the typical migration process. They've truly felt like an extension of our team throughout the project."
