A specialty fasteners distributor — 12k SKUs across 17 brands — ran B2B commerce on WooCommerce with 61 plugins, three of which handled net terms and tiered pricing and broke on every update. A ten-week migration to Shopify Plus B2B replaced the plugin stack with native primitives and took product-page CLS from 0.31 to 0.02.
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
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 — net terms and tiered B2B pricing — were also the three that broke on every update cycle. Product pages carried a CLS of 0.31, well outside Core Web Vitals thresholds, because every plugin brought its own late-loading scripts.
The constraint
B2B requirements — company accounts, net terms, per-customer price lists — are exactly what generic commerce themes don’t handle, which is how the plugin sprawl happened in the first place. 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
Weeks 1–8
WooCommerce → Shopify Plus B2B, with companies, catalogs, and net terms running on native platform primitives instead of plugin glue.
Weeks 2–6
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
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
Most replatform wins are subtraction. Each of the 61 plugins was a late-loading script shifting layout and an update-day liability; moving the B2B stack onto native primitives removed the breakage class entirely, and CLS followed the script weight out the door. Nothing was "optimized" — the cause was removed.
What happened
Launch shipped in week ten with product-page CLS at 0.02, down from 0.31 — from failing Core Web Vitals to comfortably inside the "good" threshold — on a stack of 4 plugins where 61 had been.
Net terms and tiered pricing now run native, which means the failure mode they used to bring — breaking on every plugin update — no longer exists to monitor.
The number that mattered
0.31 → 0.02
Cumulative Layout Shift on product pages, at launch
Shopify Plus B2B · 10-week migration
Measurement notes
A metric without a source is an assertion. Every number on this page is listed below with how it was counted.
Anonymity. Client name withheld under NDA — most industrial distributors prefer the case study without the logo. The vertical, scale, timeline, and every number are as measured; only identifying details are removed. Reference calls available on request.
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