The store had grown the way WooCommerce stores grow: a plugin for every problem, 61 of them by the time we audited it. The three that mattered most ran net terms and tiered B2B pricing, and those were the three that broke on every update. Product pages carried a CLS of 0.31, well outside Core Web Vitals, because every plugin loaded its own late scripts.
Anonymized · NDA
CLS 0.31 to 0.02 at launch,and 61 plugins down to 4.
A specialty fasteners distributor with 12k SKUs across 17 brands ran B2B commerce on WooCommerce and 61 plugins. Three of them handled net terms and tiered pricing, and broke on every update. A ten-week migration to Shopify Plus B2B swapped the plugin stack for native primitives and took product-page CLS from 0.31 to 0.02.
- Client
- Specialty fasteners distributor
- Scale
- 12k SKUs · 17 brands
- Services
- Website Development
- Engagement
- 2024 · 10 weeks
61 → 4
Plugins after the migration
12k
SKUs across 17 brands migrated
10 wk
WooCommerce to Shopify Plus B2B, kickoff to launch
Native
Net terms, companies, and catalogs — zero plugins
The situation
Where they started.
The constraint
What made it hard.
B2B requirements like company accounts, net terms, and per-customer price lists are exactly what generic commerce themes don’t handle. That’s how the plugin sprawl started. The migration had to land those workflows on native platform primitives, carry 17 brands’ spec tables across, and do it without pausing a working store.
What we ran
The work, phase by phase. What shipped, and when.
Weeks 1–8
Platform migration
WooCommerce → Shopify Plus B2B, with companies, catalogs, and net terms running on native platform primitives instead of plugin glue.
Weeks 2–6
Plugin elimination
61 plugins audited down to 4. Everything else either became a platform feature or turned out to be solving a problem the old platform had created.
Weeks 5–10
Custom spec-table sections
Liquid sections for brand spec tables — built once, reused across 17 brands’ product pages.
This is what a Website Development engagement at this scale looks like in practice.
Why it worked
The mechanism. What actually moved the number.
Most replatform wins come from subtraction. Each of the 61 plugins was a late-loading script that shifted layout and a liability on update day. Moving the B2B stack onto native primitives removed the whole class of breakage, and CLS followed the script weight out the door. We didn’t optimize anything. We removed the cause.
What happened
The results. As measured, dips included.
Launch shipped in week ten with product-page CLS at 0.02, down from 0.31. That’s the jump from failing Core Web Vitals to comfortably inside the “good” range, on a stack of 4 plugins where 61 had been.
Net terms and tiered pricing now run native. The failure they used to cause, breaking on every plugin update, simply isn’t there to monitor anymore.
The number that mattered
0.31 → 0.02
Cumulative Layout Shift on product pages, at launch
Shopify Plus B2B · 10-week migration
Measurement notes
How these numbers were measured.
A metric without a source is an assertion. Every number on this page is listed below with how it was counted.
- CLS 0.31 → 0.02
- Product-page Cumulative Layout Shift, measured at launch against the pre-migration baseline.
- Scope & stack
- Verbatim from the launch retro: 12k SKUs, 17 brands, 10 weeks, Shopify Plus B2B with native companies/catalogs/net terms, 4 plugins remaining.
Anonymity. Client name withheld under NDA. Most industrial distributors prefer the case study without the logo. The vertical, scale, timeline, and every number are exactly as measured. Only the identifying details are removed. Reference calls available on request.
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Anonymized · NDA+43.5%
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Your catalog, same standard
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Held to the same standard as the studies above: we measure where you stand today — organic and AI-search visibility across your top categories — and show you the baseline before we propose a thing.