E-commerce Strategy · Operations · Shopify Migration
2,000+ products · 200+ gemstones · WooCommerce → Shopify · PageSpeed ~2 → 80
SARDA had a problem.
During live shows, they were overselling inventory almost daily.
And once I started digging into why, it became clear this wasn’t something another plugin was going to fix.
The Setup Couldn’t Keep Up With the Sale
SARDA does a lot of live selling.
So instead of orders trickling in throughout the day, a piece could hit the screen and suddenly multiple people were trying to buy it at the exact same time.
The problem? Inventory was bouncing between WooCommerce, Acumatica, and other parts of their tech stack, and those systems simply couldn’t talk to each other fast enough.
The website might say 10 pieces were available while several customers were checking out at once. By the time the correct inventory count made its way back to the site, they had already sold more than they had.
And customers noticed.
Their AOV Was Basically a Lie
Customers figured out pretty quickly that building a cart during a live show was risky.
By the time they finished shopping, something they wanted might be gone.
So they adapted.
Buy one piece. Check out.
Go back to the show.
Buy another. Check out again.
Someone could buy seven pieces in one night and place seven separate orders to do it.
So when I looked at AOV, the number technically wasn’t wrong.
But it wasn’t showing us the whole picture.
What looked like a customer-spend problem was really behavior being shaped by an inventory problem.
That matters.
Because if we had treated AOV as the problem, we would have been trying to convince customers to build bigger carts when they had already learned that bigger carts could work against them.
We Tried Fixing What We Had First
The original WooCommerce site had a PageSpeed score around 2.
Yes. Two.
I worked on the existing site and got it up to about 12.
And overselling slowed down.
That told me speed was definitely part of the problem.
It also told me speed wasn’t the whole problem.
Even with a faster site, we still had multiple systems passing inventory back and forth during one of the busiest moments in the customer journey.
At some point, optimizing the setup stops being the answer.
You need a better setup.
So we moved to Shopify.
But I Didn’t Want to Just Rebuild the Same Website
Moving to Shopify solved the bigger inventory issue because inventory could now update where the purchase was actually happening.
No more waiting for a separate system to send the new count back before the storefront knew an item had sold.
But if we were going through a full migration, I didn’t want to take everything that wasn’t working and recreate it somewhere prettier.
The new store needed to fit how SARDA actually sells and how their customers actually shop.
And with more than 2,000 products, that mattered.
A lot.
Take the gemstones
SARDA carries more than 200 different stones.
Internally, organizing them by stone name makes perfect sense.
But customers don’t always shop that way.
Sometimes they know exactly which gemstone they want.
Sometimes they just want something blue.
So we built the filters around both.
Customers could shop by stone name, shop by color, or combine colors. And once they got to the products, they could still see the actual gemstone names.
But that’s the point.
The customer shouldn’t have to understand how the business organizes its inventory just to find something they like.
We did the same thing with the rest of the store
Live shows were a major sales channel, so we built around them.
We added countdowns for upcoming shows and ways to highlight pieces customers had just seen live.
They run presales, so we created a dedicated experience for those.
We added Shop the Look to make it easier to discover pieces together.
Product information changed depending on what someone was actually viewing, so bracelet-specific information didn’t need to show up on a ring.
The mega menu used product photography because with jewelry, sometimes seeing the product is what makes you want to keep looking.
And yes, we cleaned up the branding too.
The old site didn’t feel like the products they were selling. So we tightened the typography, photography, navigation, and overall visual experience to better match the brand.
Different decisions.
Same question:
What does this business need the website to do?
The Result
The most important result was the one we actually moved platforms to solve:
The daily overselling problem stopped.
Inventory could now update directly inside Shopify, eliminating the lag that had been causing overselling during live shows.
We also migrated more than 2,000 products with less than 12 hours of downtime.
And PageSpeed went from:
2 → 12 → 80
The first jump came from improving the WooCommerce site.
The second came with the move to Shopify.
But the real win wasn’t just a faster site.
We ended up with an e-commerce setup that could finally keep up with the way the business already worked: live selling, limited inventory, presales, hundreds of gemstones, thousands of products, and bursts of customers trying to buy at the same time.
See the Before + After
Before: WooCommerce
After: Shopify
The walkthrough was recorded right after launch, so you can see some of the decisions in action, including the gemstone filters, mega menu, live-show features, Shop the Look, dynamic product information, and presale setup.
The Part I Keep Coming Back To
It would have been really easy to look at AOV and say, “We need to get people to buy more.”
Except people were buying more.
That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was everything happening underneath the number.
That’s why I don’t like jumping straight from a KPI to a tactic.
Sometimes the thing that looks like a marketing problem is actually sitting in operations. Or technology. Or somewhere in the customer experience.
You have to follow it.
Because the number on the dashboard might tell you where to look.
It doesn’t always tell you what’s wrong.
When Growth Slows, the Next Move Matters
If something in your e-commerce business isn’t working the way it should, let’s figure out what’s actually getting in the way.
