If you're running ecommerce for a food, beverage, beauty, wellness, or home brand on a platform that made sense five years ago, you already know the feeling. The site is slow. Your team cannot make a basic homepage update without a developer. Every new feature, a quiz, a bundle builder, a recipe section, turns into a custom project with a six-figure price tag.
This is the reality for the CPG brands we work with every day: the ones on shelves at Whole Foods, Target, and your local grocery store, running lean on WooCommerce or BigCommerce, or operating a homegrown platform or heavy stack on Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) or Magento (Adobe Commerce) that their team has patched together for years. The starting point differs. The wall they hit does not.
We've worked with CPG brands for 20 years, and for the last 17 of them, Shopify has been where we've focused that work. Shopify becoming the default platform for CPG is not a marketing story. It comes down to the basics: Shopify's total cost of ownership is 33% lower than competing platforms and does not balloon with every new feature, its checkout converts 15% higher on average, its app ecosystem replaces custom builds that can to take months, and its merchant admin is something a small marketing team can run without a developer.
We've turned two decades of that experience, plus over 100 Shopify migrations, into a new playbook built specifically for CPG brands considering the move.
The specific walls CPG brands hit: platforms that cannot support subscriptions or B2B without a six-month dev project, teams too small for the platform they are running, multi-brand portfolios managing a dozen separate sites. We walk through real examples across food and beverage, beauty and skincare, health and wellness, and home and family, including how Sweet Loren's saw a 36% lift in conversion rate after we migrated it from WooCommerce, and how we helped McCormick consolidate 13 brands, from Cholula to Frank's RedHot, onto a single Shopify instance.
"We don't have the bandwidth." "We've invested too much to start over." "What about our data?" These are the questions we hear on nearly every discovery call, and the playbook addresses each directly, including how sunk cost thinking misses the ongoing cost of staying put.
Catalog complexity, backend systems, integrations, content volume. The brands with the smoothest launches did this work before the project kicked off, and we give you the right questions to answer first.
Store locators, recipe and Instacart integration, subscriptions, package protection, alcohol compliance, ERP and middleware. CPG brands need a fundamentally different stack than a typical ecommerce brand, and we name the partners we trust and why.
We cover what tends to pay off in the 12 months after go-live, including the lifecycle marketing work that helped one brand grow retention revenue 195% year over year.
This is where SEO was 20 years ago. Search is already changing: AI assistants and LLM-powered tools now synthesize product recommendations and buying guidance directly, often without ever sending a customer to your site. The brands building their content and technical foundation for that shift now, on a platform that supports it, are the ones building an advantage that gets harder to close every year someone else waits.
The full playbook goes deeper on every one of these areas, with more brand examples, our recommended tech stack partner by partner, and a framework for deciding whether your next move should be a 1:1 migration, a migration with redesign, or a full transformation.
Download the free Shopify Migration Playbook.
Barrel is a Shopify Platinum Partner that has designed, built, and optimized ecommerce experiences for 300+ CPG brands, spanning food and beverage, beauty, supplements, personal care, and home and family. If you are weighing whether now is the time to move, reach out at barrelny.com/contact for a technical discovery session.
