Aussie Car Hoists went live on Shopify this week — a full move off WooCommerce for a family-run hoist supplier in Wendouree that has been trading since 2005. The design came from the team at ASCET Digital; we built it as a native Shopify theme and did the migration and the custom work underneath. Here is what a job like that actually contains, because "we'll move you to Shopify" hides most of it.
The data is the easy part to underestimate
Products, variants, customers, orders and URLs all have to come across, and each one fails differently when it goes wrong. Products are usually fine. Customers are fine until you remember that passwords cannot migrate, so everyone is going to be asked to reset one. Orders matter more than people expect, because the business still needs to look up what somebody bought three years ago when they ring about a part.
URLs are the one that quietly costs money. Every existing product page has an address that Google already knows and that customers have bookmarked, and WooCommerce and Shopify do not structure those addresses the same way. Without redirects mapping old to new, every one of those becomes a 404 on launch day and the rankings that took years to build start again from nothing. Mapping them is dull work and it is not optional.
Freight is where equipment stores actually break
This is the part that separates a store selling t-shirts from a store selling hoists.
A four-post hoist is not a parcel. It is heavy, it is oversized, and what it costs to send to a workshop in regional Victoria is not what it costs to send to an industrial estate in Perth. The default answer — a flat rate, or free shipping with the cost buried in the price — is either losing money on every distant order or quietly overcharging everyone nearby to cover it.
So the store has a custom Mainfreight integration: freight is worked out against the real carrier rather than guessed at, on goods that genuinely need a carrier who handles this sort of thing. It is one of the larger pieces of custom development in the build and it is invisible when it works, which is the point.
Not everything should go in a cart
The site sells directly — prices are on the page, from around $3,900 up past $7,000, and you can buy a hoist the way you would buy anything else. It also has a Get a quote path running alongside.
Both, deliberately. Somebody fitting out a new workshop is buying several things at once, may need a site visit and often wants to talk to a person before spending that much. Somebody replacing a known unit already knows the model number and just wants it ordered. Forcing either one down the other's path loses the sale. Trade equipment is one of the clearer cases where the enquiry form is not a failure of the cart, it is a second product.
The bit that matters in two years
The theme lives in a GitHub repository. That sounds like an implementation detail and it is actually the part with the longest shelf life.
It means every change is reviewable and reversible, that a second developer can pick the work up without archaeology, and — the important one — that the business is not tied to us. If they want another agency to take it on later, the whole theme is sitting in version control ready to hand over. A store you cannot leave is not a store you own.
The other half of that is what it does not take away. It is a native Shopify OS 2.0 theme, so the standard page editor and section system still work exactly as Shopify intends. The client can add a page, reorder sections and change content without ringing anyone. Plenty of custom builds quietly remove that in exchange for a tidier codebase, and then every text change becomes a support ticket and a small invoice. More on how we build Shopify themes →
What we are not going to tell you
How well it has worked. It launched this week.
The goals are the ordinary ones — more sales, more enquiries, and looking like a business worth spending five thousand dollars with. Whether it delivers those is a question for a few months' time with real numbers attached, not for a launch post. Anyone publishing conversion improvements the week a site goes live is either counting something that does not matter or making it up.
What can be said now is that the old site was holding the business back, and the new one is faster, clearer about what things cost, and honest about how you get them delivered.
If you are weighing up the same move
The platform decision comes first and it is genuinely arguable in both directions — we wrote up that comparison rather than pretending there is one right answer. But if you are already leaning towards moving, the questions worth asking a developer are these: who maps the URLs, how is freight calculated on your actual products, and can you still edit your own pages afterwards.
If the answers are vague, the migration is going to be vague too.
Thinking about moving a store, or stuck on one that fights you?
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