Lazy Susan

Lazy Susan is a leading provider of high-quality garden furniture, serving customers across the UK and Europe. With a reputation for excellent craftsmanship and customer service, the company has seen solid growth year on year. To support their continued growth, Lazy Susan has partnered with GPMD for 5 years to enhance its ecommerce operations: focusing on automation, marketing, and system integrations. Building on this success, the company recently embarked on a significant re-platforming journey, migrating from Shopware 5 to Shopify Plus.

Challenge

As Lazy Susan continued to scale, its legacy platform, Shopware 5, presented several limitations that hindered growth and efficiency:

• End-of-Life Concerns: Shopware 5 was approaching the end of its lifecycle, creating security risks and limiting future feature development
• Performance and Scalability Issues: The platform struggled to handle increasing order volumes and peak seasonal traffic efficiently
• Complex Maintenance: Managing updates, third-party integrations, and customizations became increasingly resource-intensive
• Limited Flexibility: The platform lacked agility for rapidly deploying new features, improving UX, and integrating modern ecommerce tools seamlessly

Recognising these challenges, Lazy Susan wanted a future-proof solution that would enhance operational efficiency, optimize customer experience, and support international growth.

Solution

To overcome these challenges, Lazy Susan collaborated with GPMD to migrate from Shopware 5 to Shopify Plus, leveraging the platform’s scalability, flexibility, and advanced ecommerce capabilities. Key solutions implemented included:

• Seamless Data Migration: GPMD ensured a smooth transition of product catalogs, customer data, and order history, minimizing downtime and preserving SEO equity
• Enhanced Performance & Speed: Shopify Plus provided a more robust infrastructure, improving site speed, mobile responsiveness and overall user experience
• Optimized Checkout & Conversion: The move enabled the adoption of Shopify’s streamlined checkout process, reducing friction and increasing conversion rates
• Modernised Tech Stack: Lazy Susan integrated leading ecommerce tools, including Klaviyo for email automation, Trustpilot and Reviews.io for social proof, Shopify Flow for automation and Ominconvert for enhanced A/B testing capabilities
• Operational Efficiencies: Shopify’s intuitive admin panel simplified day-to-day operations, allowing the team to focus on growth strategies rather than platform maintenance

‍

Lazy Susan have a unique and complex product bundling structure. Not only do Lazy Susan need the ability to present well-structured bundles clearly to customers, they also needed the flexibility to create the product structures they wanted, as well as be able to easily handle complex tax settings, too. To achieve this, GPMD undertook a  bespoke implementation which made use of various advanced Shopify features. Complex, configurable product sets were created by combining various metaobjects that determine configurable slots, which allow the customer to add and select the different products they desire to their bundle. 

Various settings allow them to control the price and display of each product in the bundle, as well as filter one slot based on the other. or example, the Lazy Susan team have the ability to  show different cushions based on the chairs that have been selected within the bundle.

To be able to combine the selected products in cart and checkout as the one bundle, a carefully modified Shopify cart transform function was used. Additionally, in order to handle differing tax requirements and fixed price needs across their UK and EU sites, we utilised market metafields, feeding them into the transform function which allowed different taxes per product, depending on country, to be set. In addition, we also make use of a special checkout UI extension to remove any tax when a customer is VAT exempt.