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8,500 SKUs off Magento 1,onto a storefront AI can read.

Northern Hydraulics ran an 8,500-SKU catalog on Magento 1, which hit end-of-life with no security patches and product markup AI search engines couldn't parse. Over 6 months we replatformed the whole catalog to a headless Next.js storefront on Shopify Hydrogen, schema-complete from day one, and carried the JIC/NPT spec quote flow across intact. Mobile category-browse INP dropped from 600ms+ to under 200ms. This was the web-dev cut of the full engagement; the qualified-lead growth is reported on the anchor study.

Client
Northern Hydraulics
Scale
~8,500 SKUs
Services
Website DevelopmentAI Search & GEO
Engagement
2022 · 6-month build

  • 8,500

    SKUs replatformed off Magento 1 in 6 months

  • <200ms

    Mobile category-browse INP, down from 600ms+

  • Day 1

    Schema-complete: Product/Offer markup on every URL

  • 0

    Data loss across the JIC/NPT spec quote flow

The situation

Where they started.

Northern Hydraulics sold 8,500 SKUs across 150+ categories of JIC and NPT hydraulic fittings, adapters, and assemblies to engineers and MRO buyers. The whole storefront ran on Magento 1, which reached end-of-life in 2020 and stopped getting security patches years before we touched it.

Two things forced the rebuild. The platform was a standing liability with no vendor support. And the product markup was a mess of legacy templates AI search engines couldn’t read, so the catalog was invisible to the engines that were starting to answer buyers’ spec questions directly. On top of that, mobile category-browse INP sat above 600ms, and the lag landed right on the add-to-cart tap.

The constraint

What made it hard.

The catalog wasn’t a set of marketing pages. It was a working quote tool. Engineers filtered by thread spec, seal type, pressure rating, and material, then built multi-line quote requests by JIC/NPT spec. All of that logic had to survive the move to a new stack with zero data loss across 8,500 SKUs, and the site had to stay live and selling the entire 6 months.

What we ran

The work, phase by phase. What shipped, and when.

  1. Weeks 1–4

    Audit and data model

    Pulled the full 8,500-SKU catalog out of Magento 1, mapped every attribute (thread spec, seal, pressure rating, material), and designed a clean product schema with Product and Offer structured data baked into the model, not bolted on later.

  2. Weeks 3–14

    Headless build

    Built the storefront in Next.js against Shopify Hydrogen for catalog, cart, and checkout. Rebuilt category browse and faceted filtering as server-rendered routes so spec filtering stayed fast on mobile.

  3. Weeks 10–18

    Quote flow carryover

    Ported the JIC/NPT spec quote flow line for line: filter to part, add by spec, build a multi-line quote request. Matched the old field logic so buyers didn’t have to relearn it.

  4. Weeks 18–26

    Cutover and hardening

    Ran the new storefront in parallel, validated all 8,500 SKUs and their schema, set 301s off every Magento URL, then cut DNS over. Tuned INP on category-browse interactions before and after launch.

This is what a Website Development engagement at this scale looks like in practice.

Why it worked

The mechanism. What actually moved the number.

Headless split the problem in two. Shopify Hydrogen handled catalog, cart, and checkout as a system a vendor patches, which retired the Magento 1 security risk outright. Next.js handled rendering, so we could server-render category and product pages and ship structured data as part of every page instead of injecting it after load.

The INP win came from moving filtering and add-to-cart off a heavy client bundle. On Magento 1, a category tap fired a full client round-trip, and the 600ms+ delay was the page rebuilding itself in the browser. Server-rendered routes with a thin interaction layer cut the main-thread work, so tap-to-response dropped under 200ms. Schema-complete from day one meant the AI-search and catalog work that came later had clean, machine-readable pages to build on.

What happened

The results. As measured, dips included.

All 8,500 SKUs moved off Magento 1 to the headless Next.js + Shopify Hydrogen build in 6 months, schema-complete from day one, with mobile category-browse INP down from 600ms+ to under 200ms. The JIC/NPT spec quote flow carried across with no loss of function, and the Magento 1 security liability was gone at cutover.

It wasn’t clean the whole way. The first cutover rehearsal surfaced ~120 SKUs with malformed legacy attributes that broke schema validation, so we held DNS for two weeks to fix the data rather than ship broken markup. This build is the foundation the AI-search and catalog growth compounded on. Those gains, and the qualified-lead growth, are reported on the anchor and AI-search studies, not here.

The number that mattered

8,500

SKUs replatformed off Magento 1

6 months · schema-complete from day one

The platform stopped being a risk we talked about every quarter. And the catalog finally browses fast on a phone, which is where half our buyers actually are.
VP of E-commerce, Northern HydraulicsIndustrial hydraulics distributor · ~8,500 SKUs

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.

8,500 SKUs replatformed, schema-complete
Counted against the Magento 1 product export reconciled at cutover; schema completeness validated SKU-by-SKU through Google’s Rich Results Test and a crawl checking Product/Offer markup on every product URL before DNS cutover.
Mobile category-browse INP 600ms+ to under 200ms
INP measured on category-browse and filter interactions via Chrome DevTools and field CrUX data, mobile profile. Baseline taken on the live Magento 1 site; post figure on the Hydrogen build at the 24-week mark.
JIC/NPT quote flow carried across
Validated by replaying a fixed set of representative quote-build journeys (filter by spec, add multi-line, submit) against both old and new stacks and diffing the resulting quote payloads.

Attribution. Published with the client’s sign-off. Metrics are as measured in the sources listed above.

Part of a bigger engagement

The rest of the Northern Hydraulics engagement.

  • Full engagement

    Industrial hydraulics distributor~8,500 SKUs

    Named · with consent

    +43.5%

    Qualified leads a month, across the full engagement

    2022 – 2025 · client CRM

    1,840 to 2,640 qualified leads a month. The full-stack rebuild behind it.

    Northern Hydraulics is an industrial hydraulics distributor — ~8,500 SKUs of JIC/NPT fittings, adapters, and assemblies sold to engineers and MRO buyers. Over a three-year relationship (2022–2025) we ran the whole growth function: brand and design, a Magento 1 to headless replatform, AI-search and technical SEO, an AI-assisted catalog rewrite, pillar content, paid ads, and cold outbound. Qualified leads went from 1,840 to 2,640 a month, up 43.5%.

    Full Growth OwnershipWebsite DevelopmentAI Search & GEOEditorial AuthorityOutbound Email2022 – 2025

  • Industrial hydraulics distributor~8,500 SKUs

    Named · with consent

    ×8.5

    AI-Overview citations, top 50 commercial queries

    4 → 34 · 6-month engagement

    4 to 34 AI-Overview citations on the top 50 commercial queries.

    Northern Hydraulics is an industrial hydraulics distributor with ~8,500 SKUs. On the top 50 commercial queries, AI Overviews were citing its manufacturers, not its own pages, so it sat in AI answers exactly 4 times. Six months of product-schema and answer-shaped page work took that to 34 AIO citations (×8.5), making the distributor the citable source instead of its suppliers.

    AI Search & GEOCatalog AI2023

  • Industrial hydraulics distributor~8,500 SKUs

    Named · with consent

    ×2

    Organic sessions from informational & pillar pages

    6-month pillar-and-cluster build

    Pillar content that out-writes the manufacturers. Informational sessions, doubled.

    Editorial cut of the Northern Hydraulics engagement (2022–2025). Over six months, senior subject-matter pillar-and-cluster content on the core fitting categories roughly doubled organic sessions from informational and pillar pages, and pushed Northern's pillars to the top of AI-Overview answers for six category terms the manufacturers used to own. This was one discipline inside the full engagement; the qualified-lead growth is reported on the anchor study.

    Editorial Authority2023 – 2024

  • Industrial hydraulics distributor~8,500 SKUs

    Named · with consent

    12%

    Reply rate, cold outbound to a built distributor list

    8-week run · engineered sender reputation

    A 12% reply rate to a cold distributor list. Deliverability, engineered first.

    Cold outbound email to a built list of hydraulics distributors and OEM buyers, run over 8 weeks as one part of the full Northern Hydraulics engagement. Deliverability came first: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up, sending domains warmed, then a tight 5-touch sequence to a researched list. The list returned a 12% reply rate.

    Outbound Email2024

More case studies

Other distributors. Same standard of proof.

  • Industrial hydraulics distributor~8,500 SKUs

    Anonymized · NDA

    +43.5%

    Qualified leads per month, on the August baseline

    Aug 2024 – Jan 2025 · client CRM

    1,840 to 2,640 qualified leads a month. No new ad spend.

    An ~8,500-SKU hydraulics distributor was stuck at 1,840 qualified inbounds a month. AI Overviews were citing its manufacturers, not its own category pages. Six months of catalog and AI-search work later, January closed at 2,640. That’s +43.5% over the August baseline, and we didn’t add a dollar of ad spend.

    Catalog AIAI Search & GEOAug 2024 – Jan 2025

  • Industrial automation distributor~12K SKUs

    Anonymized · NDA

    ×8.5

    AI Overview citation count, top 50 commercial queries

    4 → 34 citations · 6-month engagement

    4 to 34 AI Overview citations in six months. One Standard retainer.

    A mid-market automation distributor with ~12K SKUs was ranking well and still bleeding organic share, because AI Overviews were eating the click-through on informational queries. Six months on the Standard editorial retainer took its AI Overview citations on the top 50 commercial queries from 4 to 34. Organic leads from informational pages doubled.

    Editorial Authority2025

  • Industrial hydraulics distributor~8,500 SKUs

    Anonymized · NDA

    8,500

    SKUs replatformed in six months

    Magento 1 → Next.js + Shopify Hydrogen

    8,500 SKUs off Magento 1, onto a storefront AI engines can read.

    The same hydraulics distributor’s commerce stack was at end-of-life. Magento 1, schema AI Overviews couldn’t read, and 600ms-plus INP that was killing add-to-cart on mobile category browsing. A six-month replatform moved all 8,500 SKUs onto a headless Next.js + Shopify Hydrogen storefront, with a complete schema graph live on the first deploy.

    Website DevelopmentAI Search & GEO2024

Your catalog, same standard

Want a number like these for your catalog?

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.

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