case studyAugust 11, 2026#replatform#regulated-products#shopify

From $2.2M to $6M, then $70,000 a year off the software bill

Two engagements, years apart, with a veterinary pharmacy distributor: a replatform and catalog rebuild that supported growth from $2.2M to $6M over three years, then a migration off Magento Enterprise that removed $70,000 a year in licensing and hosting.

A distributor selling regulated animal-health products was stuck on a platform that fought its own catalog: thousands of SKUs with prescription rules, weight-based pricing, and customer-specific requirements the old system handled with workarounds stacked on workarounds. We worked with them twice, years apart, on two different problems.

Act one: growth

We replatformed the store, rebuilt the catalog around how buyers actually search, and automated the operational work that had been manual.

The hard part was prescription products. Regulated items usually end up phone-order-only because nobody wants to touch the compliance problem. We built purchase gating instead: verification before checkout, compliant messaging on the product page, and a flow that keeps regulated items sellable online.

Revenue grew from $2.2M to $6M over the following three years. The client’s team deserves most of the credit; our job was making sure the platform was never the reason a sale didn’t happen.

Act two: cost

Later, the Magento Enterprise bill had stopped earning its keep: enterprise licensing and the servers to run it, for a store that no longer needed either. We moved them to Shopify. $60,000 a year in licensing and $10,000 a year in hosting came off the books, and the storefront got faster and cleaner on the way out.

The bill went down while the experience went up, which is not the usual trade.

Replatform · Catalog architecture · RX gating · $2.2M to $6M over 3 years · $70K/yr removed

Working through something similar?

Most of what we publish comes straight from engagements. If the problem in this piece looks like yours, we've probably already built the fix once.

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