BODi, formerly Beachbody, is the company behind P90X, 21 Day Fix, 80 Day Obsession, and a 24-year catalog of in-home fitness programs. The company retired the multi-level marketing model that built the brand, rebranded as BODi in 2022, and shifted to a fully direct-to-consumer model across digital subscriptions and nutritional products.
The business pivot worked, but the commerce platform supporting it did not. After a deep evaluation, BODi migrated to Shopify in under eight months, handling the build in-house with support from Shopify Professional Services across implementation, payment migration, and growth audits. The team launched on a Monday night and was talking about the fast-follow release by Thursday.
With Shopify, BODi has achieved:
- 10 percentage point lift in checkout conversion at launch, with further gains after enabling Shop Pay
- More than 1 million payment methods migrated at 99.5 percent average success across three regional storefronts
- More than 800,000 active subscriptions migrated via Recharge at 99.9 percent success, including subscriptions over 15 years old
- Five engineers redeployed from commerce maintenance to digital streaming and app experience
- Days or weeks, not months, to ship affiliate integrations, payment providers, and merchandising changes
- Zero escalations during hypercare, with a six-hour launch window completed in four
- Under eight months of focused build, including site, data migration, and the launch of a new P90X nutritional line
BODi’s old commerce stack didn’t fit the new business model
For most of its history, BODi operated as a multi-level marketing model. Coaches sold programs and nutritionals to networks of customers. The commerce stack underneath that motion was deeply customized and fully headless. It worked for the business it was built for.
By 2025, that business looked different. BODi had moved away from the multi-level marketing model, leaned into direct-to-consumer, and was investing in a digital streaming platform alongside its nutritional product line.
The legacy stack was consuming engineering capacity. Heather Fredrickson, Director of Consumer Engineering at BODi, led a commerce engineering team of about five engineers, with up to eight people across commerce and merchandising tied up maintaining the platform. With the business pivot complete, BODi needed engineers to build the digital streaming platform, the consumer app, and a long-postponed website consolidation, rather than maintaining custom commerce infrastructure.
We wanted to take advantage of features that were already built. The amount of engineering we were spending on maintaining a custom commerce stack was too much for where the business was going.
The team also had a non-trivial migration to plan: more than 1 million stored payment credentials across the US, UK, and Canada, plus 818,000 active subscriptions across both digital streaming and physical nutritional products. Some of those subscriptions had been on file for over 15 years.
BODi chose Shopify, then chose to skip the implementation partner
BODi had completed a vendor evaluation before the business pivot. When the team revisited the decision under its new direct-to-consumer model, Shopify still stood out as an opinionated, well-tested commerce platform with an ecosystem that could replace large parts of the custom stack. It also helped that BODi's CEO and founder, Carl Daikeler, was already a Shopify fan.
Our CEO is a big Shopify fan and was very excited to get the purple button.
Bringing other stakeholders on board came down to the business case. Shopify partnered with Amber Otto, Group Vice President of Corporate Applications and Customer Support, to build a detailed ROI model, supplying the platform benchmarks and merchant comparables that stress-tested projected gains in conversion and average order value against the custom payment processing features the team would leave behind. The ROI was clear, and finance approved the migration.
The bigger decision was implementation. BODi chose to skip a system integrator. The team trusted their internal engineering bench, their project management discipline, and a five-day on-site discovery with the Shopify Professional Services team, which gave them confidence that the partnership would work.
Shopify demonstrated a clear understanding of their product's implementation during the sales process. That was reassuring, because many other major SaaS platforms rely solely on implementation partners.
The engagement began with a five-day on-site discovery and planning session that set the project in motion. From there, three workstreams ran in parallel. Shopify Professional Services supported implementation advisory, contributed to more than 150 solutioning efforts and 24 merchant enablement workshops, and escalated 14 platform-level issues for fast resolution. The team also led the live payment migration across BODi, Cybersource, Stripe, Recharge, and Shopify for all three storefronts. While a typical Professional Services subscription migration lasts about three weeks, BODi's took four to five months because the complexity of working with a legacy gateway fell outside the standard playbook. In parallel, Shopify Growth Services scoped post-launch audits across SEO, conversion rate optimization, and web performance.
The Professional Services team understood what we needed in our business and what made our project successful. They could lobby on our behalf within the whole Shopify ecosystem to get us the changes and fixes we needed in a way we couldn't have if we weren't working with them.
For the partner ecosystem, BODi prioritized one criterion: each partner's level of focus on their Shopify integration. The team selected Recharge for subscriptions, Loop for returns, Avalara for sales tax, and Rebuy for promotions and add-on offers. Recharge specifically beat out competitors with larger enterprise logos because BODi wanted to be wholly in the ecosystem.
A partnerless path would not have been feasible within our timeframe without Shopify Professional Services. They became integrated parts of our teams and bridged the gap between documentation and our reality.
To keep the project scope grounded, Mike Farrell, who led requirements and design, established a clear rule around priorities.
We focused on identifying what we ended up calling our non-negotiables: the absolute baseline must-haves we needed by cutoff. That grounded us to the necessities, and then we approached the rest from the angle of, given bandwidth, what enhancements really matter.
Building around platform best practices
Moving from a fully headless, customizable platform to a more opinionated one was an adjustment. Engineers who had previously built custom solutions for nearly everything, now worked within Shopify’s established patterns, while stakeholders aligned around the platform’s built-in best practices.
BODi's project leadership made platform best practices a core principle from day one.
We had a slide that said 'Shopify is the best practice.' We're not going to steer away from the best practice so that we can get all the benefits of Shopify. That was really helpful, because in prior projects it was hard to deflect all those asks that come in.
The discipline went all the way to the top. Jared and the leadership team carried the same principle into every executive review.
Even all the way up to our founder Carl: sorry Carl, you asked for this and Shopify doesn't do it, so we're not going to do it. That's probably the best outcome for everybody involved.
Amber recognized the change-management piece for the longtime team members who had built BODi's previous custom systems. Many of them had spent years operating under a "find every edge case and solve for it" mindset. The worst-case version of that mindset, as she put it, was an earlier replatforming that had taken five years and cost multi-millions of dollars.
It helped to be able to namedrop Shopify. There are millions of companies on Shopify. They survive. It's okay. We don't have to solve for every edge case.
The single most complex piece of the implementation was BODi's combined digital and nutritional subscription model, a pairing rarely offered together. Customizing the my-account and subscription pages to handle required ongoing collaboration between BODi, Shopify Professional Services, Shopify product teams, and Recharge.
Some of Shopify’s built-in conventions also improved the customer experience. The standardized PDP pathing structure, where every product page lives under /product, resolved a navigation issue from BODi’s previous site that made it harder for customers to return to product pages from the cart. The change was small, but the impact on conversion was measurable.
Moving 1 million payment methods and more than 800,000 subscriptions at enterprise scale
The live payment migration moved over 1 million cards across three regional storefronts at a 99.5 percent average success rate. The team ran a bulk migration before launch and a delta migration on launch day to capture any payment methods customers had updated in the interim:
- US: 822,000 cards in the bulk migration at 99.9 percent success, plus 78,000 in the delta migration at 99.9 percent
- UK: 8,500 cards in the bulk migration at 99.5 percent success, plus 911 in the delta migration at 97.6 percent
- Canada: 110,000 cards in the bulk migration at 99.9 percent success, plus 9,100 in the delta migration at 99.8 percent
In parallel, more than 800,000 subscribers migrated via Recharge at a 99.9 percent success rate, including subscriptions on file for over 15 years. From the beginning, the team treated subscription retention as non-negotiable.
We were ambitious. We did not want to lose any subscriptions. We're a subscription business. The team's standard was 'no subscription left behind.'
The team prioritized planning and test rounds early, simplified the SKU and product landscape by standardizing over a thousand legacy SKUs, and manually fixed roughly a thousand customer addresses in advance. Credit cards were clean going in. The result was a migration that beat Amber's already ambitious goal.
The full project, including site build, payment migration, subscription migration, and three concurrent storefronts, shipped in under eight months of focused build. The launch itself was a Monday night cutover. The team blocked off a six-hour window and finished in four. They reserved two weeks for hypercare, but by Thursday were already discussing the fast-follow release.
By Thursday we were talking about the fast follow release because things were looking good. We didn't need to preserve our lower environment for hot fixes. It was a smashing success.
Conversion up immediately, time to market in days
At launch, BODi’s checkout conversion rate increased by 10 percentage points, with additional gains after Shop Pay was enabled. The team achieved the lift without introducing new features during cutover and while removing one payment method.
We did not add new features. If anything, we took away a payment method. That's a compelling example of just all the little things Shopify has tested and tested and tested. It surpassed even my own expectations.
Time-to-market shrank from months to days or weeks. The team added affiliate integrations and launched a new P90X nutritional product line alongside the new Shopify site, both of which would have been significantly more difficult on the previous stack.
The platform also improved operations in unexpected areas. Subscriptions run noticeably faster overnight on Shopify and Recharge than they did on the previous stack, allowing the warehouse to begin processing and fulfilling orders earlier in the morning. The operational change was small, but the downstream impact on customer experience was meaningful.
It's a lift beyond technology. Shopify is a platform teams can just go and work with and optimize. It frees up the whole company to be more efficient.
Site speed improved immediately after launch
The performance gains were measurable on day one. In controlled lab testing under simulated 3G mobile conditions, BODi's pages load 14 to 25 percent faster on Shopify Plus than on the previous platform:
- Homepage: 6,040ms to 4,558ms, 25 percent faster
- Collection pages: 5,722ms to 4,903ms, 14 percent faster
- Product pages: 6,000ms to 5,170ms, 14 percent faster
Real user data tells the same story. Across hundreds of thousands of pageviews in the first two weeks (excluding non-cacheable private dashboard views), the homepage loaded in 1.9 seconds, collection pages in 1.5 seconds, and product pages in 1.7 seconds at the 75th percentile on mobile. The site comfortably passes Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds across the board:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): 1,720ms at the 75th percentile, well under the 2,500ms good threshold
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint): 115ms at the 75th percentile, under the 200ms good threshold
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): 0.008 at the 75th percentile, well under the 0.1 good threshold
No major post-launch performance remediation was required.
Engineers move from commerce maintenance to digital experience
Before the migration, the core commerce web engineering team was about five engineers, with up to eight total resources across commerce and merchandising. Today, BODi expects to keep two to three engineers on Shopify at roughly fifty percent capacity. That frees four to five engineers to focus full-time on the digital streaming platform, the consumer app, and a long-postponed project to consolidate several BODi properties.
We're not having to be heads down and go through discovery about the best commerce practices, how to optimize the funnel, how to improve conversion rates. All of that is being done by Shopify. We have that much more time to dedicate to all of these different concepts on the streaming side.
The original ROI model has already proven conservative. According to Mike, platform investments often take a year to fully materialize, but BODi was already ahead of expectations.
What's next
With the core migration behind them, BODi is moving fast on the next set of investments.
The merchandising and growth teams are now leading the front-end roadmap, rolling out design and user experience updates that had been deferred during the cutover period. More physical product launches are queued up for later in the year, anchored to the Shopify and Recharge stack. The P90X nutritional line that launched alongside the new site, spanning nine SKUs across five products in a single day, is the first of several planned launches. Engineering capacity, freed by the migration, is now pointed at what Jared describes as a "literally endless" feature roadmap on the digital streaming side.
The team is also leaning into Shopify's AI surface area. Jared uses Sidekick daily for everything from data queries to product questions, and now recommends it as the first thing to try for anything new in Shopify. Heather sees the same pattern across her team.
We have several people using Sidekick as just that, as their sidekick. Throughout the project, when we hit a challenge or restriction, it was 'how do I do this, where do I find it.' We threw a lot at Shopify Professional Services, but Sidekick helped us help ourselves where we could.
BODi has also been a beta participant on Shopify's new dev dashboard, used the Shopify AI toolkit for developers to generate GraphQL queries and accelerate analysis, and is preparing to introduce its merchandising team to Sim Gym for landing page and acquisition funnel testing. The team is also evaluating Shopify's Agent SDK and plugins for custom apps and merchandising tooling.
This is a long-term investment. It [replatforming] was a grind. The success rate of the data migration, the hypercare, it was an A+ outcome. But you're really going to see the fruit of the labor down the road. That's what I'd want anyone going through this process to keep in the back of their mind.
Heather, who started the project skeptical of the timeline, ended it eager for what came next.
I remember someone asking me at the beginning of the project, 'Are you excited for the Shopify project?' And my answer was, 'I'm excited for it to be over.' They thought I was already dreading it. I told them no, I just think this is when the fun starts. This is when we really get to see the benefits and how we can flex it.
Bryan added that the new platform changed the pace of product launches.
Years ago we were on Oracle, and launching a new product was a project. We were able to bundle the P90X program launch with the Shopify platform launch pretty easily. That speaks to how easy this was, and what we can do with new launches in the future.
