From Canva to Shopify
How Shopify Enabled Scalability and Storytelling
Context
This business, initially relying on Canva for a landing page and Eventbrite for ticket sales, encountered limitations as they scaled. The platform fees and increasing manual operational tasks became significant pain points.
Recognising the need for a centralised system to support their expansion into merchandise, gift cards, and online courses, they transitioned to Shopify.
Results
The move to Shopify resulted in a future-proof platform for diverse offerings and enhanced storytelling, delivering significant cost savings (at least 50% for a 100-ticket workshop) while addressing the trade-off of lost marketplace visibility through proactive digital marketing efforts.
Visit LIVE website: https://cookupdublin.myshopify.com/
Moving away from Canva & Eventbrite
Platform fee was one reason, another reason was the increasing of timespend on manual operational tasks as the business started scaling up. They knew it’s time to centralise their operations in one place. That’s where I came in and suggested Shopify.
Why Shopify, but not WordPress
1. Business model: Not only selling tickets for workshops, they plan to sell merchandise, giftcards, and online course in the future. Shopify has features for product management, order processing, and diverse payment gateway integrations. This guarantees a scalable foundation that aligns with this vision.
2. Costs: Even though Shopify require monthly subscriptions, the costs are pretty much the same because WordPress plugins also require same subscriptions.
3. Performance: To cover the same range of functionalities, the number of required plugins on WordPress easily lead to the risk of slow performance website. This is critial factor that would require ongoing monitoring and optimisation.
Moving to Shopify
Initially, the team built their landing page on Canva, then redirects visitors to Eventbrite to buy tickets. That was a smart choice. Canva is a great tool to launch a web page quickly. The only thing was it’s just a 1-page website.
When the business started scaling up, more work came in, for example, customers wanted to buy vouchers for friends & family, customers want to receive recepies online. The team had to deal with that on spreadsheet, email, manually. That’s the moment they had to switch to new platform.
By migrating to Shopify, I enabled the team to manage the website content, the ticket the sales there. They still use email and spreadsheets, but only for their operational management.
Better end-to-end flows
With this e-commerce platfrom, we created a better communication for customers to learn about the workshop, the business and its values.
We now focus more on storytelling, connecting our customers with Chefs and their back story of the food. By the end of the day, this business is not about selling cooking workshops, it’s about sharing the experience and the story behind the plate that the customers learn to recreate in the workshop.
Previously, all essential details, for example: workshop details, chef biographies, refund policies, etc. were on a single event details page on Eventbrite. The move to Shopify enabled a more digestible and engaging delivery of this information. We now can present the content strategically across relevant website pages.
Gains
- Scalable Platform: Shopify’s got essential features to handle their upcoming roadmap, from merch, gift cards, to online courses.
- Storytelling Power: Shopify’s flexible theme customisation and content management system allowed for the creation of dedicated “Our Story”, chef profile pages, enabling a brand narrative that focuses on the culinary expertise behind the workshops.
- Cost Savings: Compared to Eventbrite’s commission-based fees, Shopify’s structure resulted in immediate cost savings. For a workshop selling 100 tickets, we calculated a reduction of at least 50% in platform-related expenses, a saving that will only amplify as the bussiness grows.
Trade-Off
- Loss of Eventbrite’s Built-in Marketplace Visibility: The primary trade-off was the loss of organic visibility within the Eventbrite marketplace, which previously served as a source of potential customers.
To mitigate this, the new strategy now is to focus on building a strong brand presence through targeted SEO optimisation on the Shopify site, engaging social media campaigns, and direct email marketing to their existing customer base.
Visit LIVE website: https://cookupdublin.myshopify.com/
Still Curious?
👉 Reach out to discuss this case study in detail and explore potential opportunities: tranbaoy90@gmail.com