Photosetup is a Romanian specialty retailer of photo, video, and audio equipment, selling online and from a physical store with its own warehouse behind both. Its customers are content creators, vloggers, photographers, videographers, and broadcast professionals, buying the gear their work depends on.
For about eight years, all of it ran on a Romanian ecommerce platform that suited the business until the business outgrew it. In March, after an eight-month migration, Photosetup moved to Shopify.
- Conversion rate up from 1.3% to 1.55% in the first full quarter after launch
- Order processing down from 15 minutes to under 20 seconds
- ERP, invoicing, and stock locations automated in one week, after seven months to connect the same ERP to the old platform
The challenge: the business changed, the platform didn’t
Photosetup spent around eight years on Gomag, a Romanian platform it moved to from a custom build. For most of that time, it was the right choice, and the business grew on it.
What changed was the business. As the operation became more complex, Photosetup needed things the setup was never built to give: control of its own storefront, faster development cycles, and room to connect whatever systems the business required. Every change went through the vendor’s technical team, raised as a ticket and described in writing. A conversion experiment on a product page, or one new line of text, meant joining a queue.
“If we wanted to change certain elements, such as work a bit on the CRO side, or just adding a new text element, it would take two to three weeks of back and forth,” says Tibi Galea, business operations manager at Photosetup.
The ERP showed where the ceiling was. Photosetup brought in a specialist team to wire its ERP system into the store, and the setup did not allow a third party to work inside the platform. The vendor’s own developers took the job on, learning an unfamiliar system as they went.
“They took about seven months to integrate our ERP, because they had to learn it. They had to look through the documentation, and it was a mess,” Tibi says.
Seven months is a long time for a business competing with eMAG, the largest marketplace in Romania, and the biggest specialist retailer in its category. Photosetup was not looking for a better version of what it had. It needed a different kind of infrastructure, one that would let it move at the speed of its own decisions.
The solution: buying for the next 10 years
Tibi and a colleague started looking for a replacement in September 2024. They worked through the local options and came close to committing to a Magento 2 solution. Shopify was not seriously on the list, because everyone already knew what it cost.
“We knew already that Shopify is expensive. So everybody was like, yeah, don’t go there,” Tibi says.
A contact at Omniconvert suggested they look anyway. Once they compared the options over a longer horizon, the shape of the decision changed. They were not buying a migration. They were buying the platform they expected to still be running in a decade.
“The migration was a bit more expensive than it would have been with another platform, but at the end of the day it just made more sense regarding the investment. We were aiming for a platform that we are likely to keep for the next 10 years,” he says.
If a new app gets released, the first integration it’s going to have is probably going to be with Shopify.
Delivery ran through eCommerce Today, a Romanian agency Photosetup chose after talking to eight or nine. What decided it was that the agency led with advice rather than a pitch, offering useful tips regardless of who won the work. Photosetup also stood up a test account and gave colleagues six months to practice on the new platform before anything went live.
The migration ran from August to March, eight months in total, slightly behind the original January target because of a third-party provider. Photosetup took the delay deliberately, preferring a later launch to an unfinished one.
The result: 20 seconds to process an order
The first things to change were the ones the old platform had made hardest. Photosetup connected its ERP, automated invoicing, and set up stock tracking across both the warehouse and the physical store.
“That was extremely easy to put together. I think in one week it was completely done,” Tibi says.
One week, against seven months for a single ERP connection before. The operating numbers followed. Conversion rose from 1.3% to 1.55% in the first full quarter after launch. On mobile, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) fell from 3.7 seconds to under 2. Processing an order dropped from up to 15 minutes to under 20 seconds, a gain Tibi credits partly to Shopify and partly to the automation around it.
Any hands-on task we had, Shopify has made two or three times faster than before. It’s just easier to operate the entire business.
What did not happen matters as much. The team’s largest fear was losing the search rankings and traffic built up over years. Traffic dipped at launch and came back. The second was the site failing during a peak like Black Friday, which did not happen either.
“It went extremely smooth. Smoother than I thought. I prepared for much worse, and it was really fine,” he says.