POLYWOOD is North America's largest direct-to-consumer outdoor furniture brand, offering more than 150,000 product variations across colors, finishes, textures, and materials — all manufactured in-house through a vertically integrated, made-to-order production process.
The company had built its ecommerce operation on a heavily customized Magento environment that, over time, consumed more than 80% of its engineering resources on maintenance rather than growth.
After migrating to Shopify, POLYWOOD reclaimed its development capacity and refocused on the customer experience. The results were immediate.
With Shopify, POLYWOOD has seen the following results:
- 22% increase in conversion rate since migrating to Shopify
- 12% increase in average order value through personalization and recommendation features
- 100% of development resources redirected from platform maintenance to value creation and AI innovation
- 6-figure reduction in total cost of ownership and operating expenses
- Fewer code-related errors, outages, and customer service escalations
- Part of Shopify's ChatGPT shopping early access cohort
The challenge: The old platform became the bottleneck
Before migrating to Shopify, POLYWOOD ran its e-commerce operations on a heavily customized Magento build. When POLYWOOD first built its commerce infrastructure, Magento was the right decision. Their in-house developers had deep experience building and managing Magento, and no other SaaS solution at the time could support their massive catalog or just-in-time manufacturing model.
But as the company grew, its Magento build became a constraint. Every new capability required heavy development without offering a competitive advantage.
We spent hundreds of hours of development resources to build integrations with 3rd parties when other platforms already had them out of the box. More than 80% of the resources were focused on platform maintenance instead of value creation. We were spending our energy on activities that were necessary, but did not create competitive advantage - We needed to change that in order to win
POLYWOOD’s large product catalog added another layer of complexity. With 150,000 product variations across colors, finishes, textures, and materials—and vertically integrated manufacturing where each configuration triggers a unique production sequence—every change required significant custom development.
That level of technical complexity demanded specialized engineering talent, which introduced another challenge. POLYWOOD isn’t a traditional technology company, and top-tier engineers often want to work for tech companies that build platforms—not for manufacturers that use them.
Maintaining a highly customized infrastructure had also become risky. With so many layers built on top of Magento, every deployment carried the risk of breaking something, and releases took time the team didn’t have. While competitors rolled out new features, POLYWOOD’s resources were tied up keeping the system running, leaving little room for innovation.
The platform that once supported growth had become the primary barrier to it. POLYWOOD needed a new foundation to keep scaling.
The solution: Moving from a custom infrastructure to Shopify
To remove the constraints of its Magento environment, POLYWOOD needed a platform that could handle enterprise-scale complexity without requiring constant custom development. The priority was replacing infrastructure while freeing internal teams to focus on growth, customer experience, and innovation.
After evaluating multiple providers, POLYWOOD chose Shopify. Here are the main reasons why:
Built-in functionality with flexible customization
The deciding factor in moving platforms was Shopify’s combination of out-of-the-box functionality and deep customization ecosystem.
Competitors offered similar baseline features, but meaningful customization often required major development investment. Shopify handled POLYWOOD’s complex product configurations and manufacturing workflows—without the need for large engineering teams to support every change.
Everything is working out of the box and we can get all the features the business required, but we can also still customize it to the level that matches our business. The other competitors, customizing it becomes a million-dollar project. Here, customization is easy.
Access to the app ecosystem
Instead of building every capability internally, POLYWOOD tapped into Shopify's verified marketplace of thousands of apps, solving roughly 75% of their custom needs immediately with enterprise-grade, verified applications.
You guys did what, in my mind, made the iPhone so successful. You nurtured a growing app ecosystem out there. People whose whole job is to identify gaps in Shopify features and then build their own business by building apps around it. That app ecosystem is an extension of the core product.
Enterprise-scale catalog management
Managing 150,000 product variations tied to made-to-order manufacturing used to require extensive custom development. On Shopify, native catalog capabilities combined with the app ecosystem handle that complexity with little need for custom engineering.
We had anticipated a 3-6 month drawdown in organic traffic and revenue due to major site structure (URL) changes going from Magento to Shopify, but we did not see this happen after cutover. All signals were positive and have remained positive since launch, engagement, CVR, AOV, site speed, SEO ranking, revenue, etc.
The developer community and partnership model
Access to Shopify developer talent was another advantage of replatforming. Finding Shopify developers, agencies, and specialized resources is far easier than staffing for proprietary platforms. For a company that can’t compete with major tech firms for top engineering talent, tapping into a deep external ecosystem made a meaningful difference.
The creative canvas
With the platform handling the infrastructure, POLYWOOD's development team went from building basic features to using Shopify as a creative canvas.
We used to have people build features on front ends and back ends that already existed out of the box. Now I have the same people using it as a canvas. It used to be that I had a development team of 20 working on 'let's build a cart abandonment feature, let's build a wishlist feature.' Now I can use these resources to build a better customer journey—let's highlight the product features better, let's show why our texture of this finish is important.
The results: Performance gains across the business
Migrating to Shopify delivered measurable improvements across POLYWOOD’s business—from conversion and order value to operational efficiency and team focus. With the platform handling infrastructure, the company could optimize the customer experience, reduce technical overhead, and reallocate internal resources to higher-value work.
Deciding to move to Shopify was one of the best decisions POLYWOOD made for the business in 2025. It bolstered our ability to innovate in the D2C world, it gave us a common foundation for all commerce beyond D2C, allowing us to rapidly launch best-in-class websites for Trade / Commercial and our B2B partners.
Conversion rate
Since migrating to Shopify, POLYWOOD has seen a 22% increase in conversion rate.
Spiegel attributes the lift to three factors:
- Shop Pay familiarity. Built-in trust at the moment of purchase reduces friction. "It's kind of like what PayPal used to be 10 years ago when people didn't want to put in their credit card but they felt safe with PayPal."
- Checkout optimization. A fast, multi-device checkout that Shopify continuously improves. "The more transactions convert for us, the better your earnings will look. So it's a shared common interest to make it as effective as possible."
- Post-add-to-cart conversion. POLYWOOD tracks how easily shoppers complete a purchase once something is in the cart, and this metric improved dramatically.
Average order value
AOV has increased by 12% since moving to Shopify, driven by personalization, recommendation engines, and out-of-the-box upsell tools. For a brand selling high-value furniture—not $20 t-shirts—even incremental gains have an outsized financial impact.
Operational efficiency
By having the platform handle infrastructure and core functionality, POLYWOOD improved operational efficiency across the organization. Key operational improvements include:
- Total cost of ownership. Reduced by six figures compared to the custom Magento build.
- Feature deployment speed. New capabilities now go live in hours or days, not months.
- Code stability. Code-related errors and downtime decreased significantly.
- Customer service escalations. Fewer negative interactions around order issues.
- Self-service capabilities. Expanded customer self-service, reducing the burden on support teams.
Customer and team feedback
The professional design community praised the new catalog experience. Shopify enabled faster browsing, better sorting and filtering, and easier product discovery. Internally, the reaction was universal:
It was such a relief and such a joy when we got it launched. It wasn't like one or two people saying, 'I like that.' Everybody was really, really happy—from reliability to trust and confidence in the website. It was just overall such an improvement.
Development team transformation
Perhaps the most telling shift is how POLYWOOD’s development team now spends its time.
We don't really have maintenance work anymore. It's all value creation work. It completely changed what we work on. All hours are spent are now focused on creating value. Building 3rd party integrations and spending 20% of the year on codebase version upgrades have become a thing of the past. It's really focused now on, 'Hey, we have great material—how do we show this better online? How do we let people better understand why our climate-tough material is different?
Looking ahead: AI as the next phase of growth
With the platform foundation in place and engineering resources no longer tied up in maintenance, POLYWOOD’s focus has shifted to what comes next. The company is now investing heavily in artificial intelligence, using it to reshape how customers discover products, visualize outdoor spaces, and manage their post-purchase experience.
Rather than treating AI as a standalone initiative, POLYWOOD is embedding it across the customer journey—from inspiration and product selection to ownership and support. The goal is to make outdoor living easier to imagine, easier to personalize, and easier to manage over time.
Over the next 6–12 months, the company is prioritizing three areas:
- Interactive product visualization. New tools to help customers better imagine outdoor spaces—a unique challenge compared to indoor rooms with defined walls and layouts. This includes advanced renderings, interactive planning tools, and potential AR experiences.
- AI-powered catalog discovery. Expanding natural-language product recommendations so customers can describe their lifestyle and receive personalized furniture suggestions across 150,000 configurations.
- Reducing post-purchase friction. Making warranty replacements, upgrades, and returns easier through AI-powered self-service, while building deeper, longer-term customer relationships.
Many people have more square footage outdoor than indoor, and they have potential for three outdoor rooms but they only have one today. There’s a lot around how do we use it as a creative canvas to inspire people and help them better imagine what they can do with their outdoor spaces.
With Shopify providing the foundation, POLYWOOD is positioning itself to compete in a future where commerce is increasingly visual, conversational, and driven by intelligent systems.
