About Parallel Imported
Parallel Imported is one of New Zealand’s most recognised online retailers — a premium importer of electronics, fragrances, home gear, and sunglasses with a loyal customer base and a high-traffic.
Over the years, Bandeira Agency and Parallel Imported built a strong working relationship, developing custom features and integrations together. But over time, a pattern became hard to ignore: the platform was getting in the way. Every meaningful change — a new page, a menu update — required dev involvement. The team wanted the freedom to move fast without depending on a developer for routine updates. They’d hit BigCommerce’s ceiling one too many times. It was time for a store migration.
Why Shopify
Shopify wasn’t chosen by default. It was chosen because it solved the exact problems Parallel Imported was running into.
The team wanted to manage their own storefront — update menus, launch campaigns, add pages — without opening a dev ticket every time. Shopify’s built-in content management made that possible. They also wanted native tools for email marketing and customer chat, reducing reliance on expensive third-party apps. And after years of navigating BigCommerce’s ecosystem, they were drawn to Shopify’s app marketplace, modern performance standards, and the speed infrastructure baked into the platform by default.
Migration Scope and Challenges
This wasn’t a simple lift-and-shift. The scale and complexity of the Parallel Imported store meant every decision carried risk.
The numbers alone tell most of the story:
- 20,000+ products with full data, custom fields and imagery
- 80,000+ orders and customer records to preserve
- 30,000+ URL redirects to map — because a single missed redirect meant a broken marketplace connection or a lost SEO ranking
- Full navigation tree restructure: BigCommerce categories were converted into categorical tags, smart collections were built on top of them, and the entire menu was rebuilt from scratch
The store operates daily at significant volume. There was no room for downtime, data loss, or SEO regression.
Data migration was handled using Cart2Cart, with every product, order, and customer record validated post-transfer. The redirect mapping was treated as a critical SEO task — each of the 30,000+ URLs was carefully matched to preserve search rankings and maintain live connections to external marketplaces.
Custom Development
The migration was also an opportunity to build features that BigCommerce had made difficult or impossible.
Product Swatches on PDP
Individual product variants are automatically linked as visual swatches on the product detail page, making it easy for customers to browse colour and configuration options.
Location-Based Delivery Timeframes
A custom delivery estimator displays real-time shipping timeframes based on the warehouse location where inventory is held. Customers see accurate delivery windows directly on the product page — no guesswork.
Product Specification Charts via Metafields
Technical product characteristics are surfaced in a structured comparison chart, built on Shopify metafields. For an electronics retailer, this significantly improves the purchase decision experience.
Custom Lightspeed POS Connector
The most technically complex piece of the project. We built a bespoke integration between Shopify and Lightspeed POS that handles inventory sync to specific warehouse locations, backorder support, discount logic, and connections to multiple external marketplaces and a PIM system. No off-the-shelf solution existed for this flow — it was built from scratch to match Parallel Imported’s exact operational requirements.
Results
- The new Parallel Imported store launched without SEO regression, zero data loss, and full operational continuity from day one
- All historical order and customer data is intact
- Core Web Vitals — fully passing
- And for the first time, the Parallel Imported team can manage their own storefront easily— on a platform built to grow with them
Planning a migration?
Tell us about your store — we’ll tell you exactly how to move it without losing a thing.
