Spitfire Audio
A complex Shopify migration that grew
organic revenue by 51% and kept customer pricing intact.
- +51% Increase in organic revenue
- +41% Growth in peak trading revenue
- +12% Increase in conversion rate
- -40% Reduction in dev overheads
Project overview
Spitfire Audio makes virtual instruments and sound libraries for composers and producers around the world. Its customers range from first-time hobbyists to Oscar, BAFTA and Grammy winners, and many have bought from the brand for years.
Loyalty sits at the centre of how Spitfire sells. Pricing, ownership benefits and product eligibility all change based on what a customer already owns. That model ran on a platform that had become complex and expensive to change, and it was slowing down international expansion.
Spitfire asked us to move the business onto Shopify without losing
any of that personalisation. From launch day the new site had to recognise each customer, understand their purchase history and price accordingly.
The brief
The biggest risk was the customer base itself. A migration that broke ownership pricing would have hit Spitfire's longest-standing, most
valuable customers first. Success meant a new platform that protected their experience, held onto organic revenue and opened up international growth at a lower running cost. The project needed to be collaborative, with our Shopify developers, designers, and architects working alongside the Spitfire development and digital teams.
Key objectives - Shopify migration
- Preserve the personalised purchasing and loyalty model
- Maintain and grow organic revenue post migration
- Make international expansion and localisation easier
- Reduced platform and maintenance overheads
- Build a scaleable platform that can be managed internally and power growth
Project highlights
We paired Shopify's checkout and commerce engine with Spitfire'sc own customer, licensing and entitlement systems. Spitfire kept control of the data that defines its relationship with each customer, and Shopify took on the heavy lifting of transactions at scale.
The site recognises a logged-in customer, reads their purchase history and shows the price they are entitled to as the page loads. Owners of related libraries see their discount straight away, exactly as they did before the move.
Every ownership discount and loyalty price on the legacy platform was mapped and recreated in the new architecture. No customer lost a benefit at launch.
Shopify Markets Pro opened up more than 300 markets with local currencies, tax handling and purchasing experiences. A composer in Tokyo or Toronto now buys in a way that feels local.
We managed URL structures, metadata and technical SEO throughout the migration and treated search as a launch requirement. Organic performance held through the switch and then grew.
Moving off bespoke infrastructure cut the work needed to keep the platform running. Spitfire's internal team now spends that time on product innovation and customer experience.
The results in detail
Spitfire's post-launch data shows the migration delivered on every
objective in the brief. Revenue grew in exactly the channels that usually
suffer most during a replatform.
- Organic revenue growth of 51% YoY
- Revenue during peak period increased by 41% YoY
- Development and maintenance overheads reduced by 40%
- More than 100 dynamic pricing rules re-created in Shopify, with no loss of benefits for their loyal customer base
- Selling across 300+ international markets with localised currency and tax
Existing customers kept their ownership pricing, loyalty discounts
and account recognition throughout. For most of them the move was invisible.
Why this worked?
A team of Shopify developers, designers, architects and SEO's working together to deliver the Spitfire Audio brief.
A replatform usually means adjusting internal processes and technology to work alongside the new platform, we wanted to do the opposite. Spitfire's pricing is how it rewards years of loyalty, so we an architecture that allowed Spitfire to maintain this flexibility. Shopify is in charge of checkout and international commerce while Spitfire's own systems still decide who owns what. The customer sees one site, and revenue grew straight after launch instead of dipping.
