Sneppies
Sneppies is a specialist swimming retailer serving everyone from recreational lane swimmers to professional athletes, across its Abcoude store and marketplaces like Bol.com and Decathlon.
About this project
Sneppies' growing catalogue had outgrown its WooCommerce store, with peak swim season weeks away. We migrated them to Shopify in three sprints, preserved SEO with careful URL mapping and built a country-aware sizing system so the same product reads "32", "4" or "S" by market. It launched on time, faster and easier to manage.
Client Introduction
Sneppies is a specialized swim shop serving everyone from recreational swimmers to professional athletes. Alongside their physical store in Abcoude, they sell through marketplaces like Bol.com and Decathlon, while their own webshop, built on WooCommerce, remained a key sales channel.
The Challenge
As the business grew, the WooCommerce webshop started to hold them back. The product catalogue kept expanding, but managing it became slow and frustrating:
- Bulk edits ate up hours
- Translations were time-consuming
- Recurring performance and maintenance issues added friction to day-to-day work
Nothing was technically broken, but scaling got harder with every new product and market. On top of that, January is peak season for swimming, and Sneppies needed the new store live before the new year, with no room for delays, downtime, or lost SEO visibility.
The Approach
We migrated Sneppies from WooCommerce to Shopify, a managed platform built for scale that offers strong out-of-the-box performance and far better bulk-editing tools, reducing maintenance overhead and giving the team more control without added complexity. The project ran in three sprints:
- Design Sprint: built directly in Shopify around a premium theme, chosen to keep custom development to a minimum
- Build Sprints (x2): first focused on core functionality and migrating products and content from the existing site, then on the wishlist and nice-to-haves
- Launch Sprint: server-side tracking setup (GA4 and GTM, web and server) and final launch preparation
SEO was treated as launch-critical throughout: we ran a structured migration with careful URL mapping, preserved metadata, and redirects where needed, so existing rankings carried over instead of resetting.
We also tackled one of the trickier pieces: sizing, which varies by country and product type, by building a flexible system using Shopify metafields and metafield translations, so the same product size shows as "32" in the UK, "4" in Germany, and "S" in the Netherlands, keeping the backend clean while the storefront stays clear and localized.
Results & Impact
- The new Shopify store launched before the end of the year, right on time for peak season
- Post-launch monitoring caught issues early
- A faster, more stable webshop that's easier to manage day-to-day
- Localization built in from the ground up, with a platform ready to grow internationally
Through GrooveCare, our ongoing care package, we continue to support Sneppies with proactive maintenance and optimization beyond launch.
Client Testimonial
"Groove Digital provided us with excellent assistance in migrating our old Woocommerce environment to our new Shopify site. Thank you!"
