There's a version of this story we hear a lot.
A retailer — maybe you — is running a real operation. Multiple locations. A sales team handling B2B accounts. Customers in different provinces, states, or countries. Inventory that needs to be the same number in the warehouse, at the POS terminal, and on the website, all at the same time.
And the system holding it all together is Epicor. Or RIS. Or some other on-premise platform that was enterprise-grade when it was installed, and hasn't meaningfully evolved since.
It works. Mostly. But "mostly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
What "Mostly Working" Actually Costs You
On-premise retail systems like Epicor and RIS were built for a world where the store and the website were two separate businesses. The POS was the real business. The website was a brochure, or at best a secondary channel.
That world doesn't exist anymore.
Today your customer browses online, picks up in store. They check your site for stock before driving over. They want to use their loyalty points whether they're shopping from their phone at midnight or at your counter on a Tuesday afternoon. They expect a seamless experience across every touchpoint — and they notice immediately when they don't get one.
Legacy on-premise systems struggle here in predictable ways:
No real-time sync between POS and ecommerce. Inventory updates run on batch jobs — every few hours, or overnight. Meaning your website happily sells products that walked out the door this morning. Every oversell is a broken promise to a customer and an operational mess for your team.
B2B treated as an afterthought. Wholesale pricing, tiered accounts, net payment terms, customer-specific catalogs — these require workarounds, manual processes, or expensive custom development that's brittle and hard to maintain.
Geographic complexity multiplied. Want to sell in French and English? Display prices in CAD and USD? Comply with different tax rules in different jurisdictions? On legacy systems, this is often three separate implementations pretending to be one.
Everything requires IT. A new promotion. A product page update. A seasonal homepage. Things that should take twenty minutes take a ticket, a deployment window, and a week.
The cost isn't just the IT budget. It's the sales you're not making. The staff hours spent on manual reconciliation. The decisions you can't make because the data isn't reliable. The growth initiatives you keep postponing because the infrastructure can't support them.
Why Shopify Plus Is the Answer for Operations at Your Scale
Shopify Plus isn't Shopify with a bigger price tag. It's a fundamentally different set of capabilities designed for businesses that have grown past what standard retail software can handle.
POS and ecommerce are one system. Inventory is live everywhere, always. A sale on the website is reflected at the register instantly. A return processed in-store shows in the customer's online account. No syncing. No batch jobs. No discrepancies.
B2B is built in. Shopify Plus includes a dedicated B2B storefront where you can manage wholesale customers, set customer-specific pricing and catalogs, configure net payment terms, and give buyers a self-serve portal — all without a separate system or custom development. Your B2C and B2B operations run in the same place, with one inventory, one customer database, one source of truth.
Multi-market is a first-class feature. Shopify Markets lets you run multiple geographic storefronts — different languages, currencies, domains, pricing, and tax rules — from a single Shopify Plus store. You're not managing three separate implementations. You're managing one store that speaks to your customers wherever they are.
The ecommerce conversion engine is best-in-class. Shopify powers more online revenue than any other platform in the world. That's not marketing copy — it's the result of billions of dollars of A/B testing, checkout optimization, and infrastructure investment that flows to every merchant on the platform. Checkout conversion rates, mobile experience, site speed: these are areas where Shopify's investment dwarfs what any individual retailer or legacy vendor can build.
Shopify POS is fast, intuitive, and built for selling. We've seen the difference this makes firsthand. Staff who dreaded the old system pick up Shopify POS in an afternoon. Checkout lines move faster. Associates spend less time navigating software and more time with customers. In-store marketing — loyalty programs, gift cards, discount campaigns — all works natively, without plugins or workarounds.
Your team runs it without IT. Merchandisers update products. Marketers launch campaigns. Operations adjusts pricing. Shopify is built for business users, not developers. The IT team gets out of the way of the business.
This Is a Big Undertaking. We Know.
We're not going to tell you migrating from Epicor or RIS to Shopify Plus is simple. It isn't.
You have years — maybe decades — of product data, customer history, order records, vendor relationships, and custom workflows embedded in your current system. Your team has built their daily routines around it. Your integrations touch your ERP, your 3PL, your accounting system.
A migration at this scale needs to be planned carefully, executed precisely, and launched without disrupting the business you're running while it happens.
This is exactly the work we do.
As a top 1% Shopify Partner backed by Y Combinator, we've built our entire practice around complex retail migrations. We use proprietary API-based migration scripts — not CSV exports, not drag-and-drop tools — to move your data accurately, maintain relationships between products, customers, orders and inventory, and configure Shopify Plus to match how your business actually operates.
Our migration service includes:
-
Full audit of your current system and data
-
Custom migration scripts built for your specific data structure
-
Products, variants, barcodes, inventory, customer history, order history — everything
-
B2B customer setup and wholesale storefront configuration
-
Multi-market and multi-currency setup
-
POS configuration across all locations
-
Staff training and hands-on go-live support
-
Post-launch support until your team is confident
Zero downtime. Your current system stays live until the moment we switch.
Once you're on Shopify Plus, our Growth Service and Design Service are there to help you get maximum value from the platform — CRO, SEO, marketing automation, custom storefront design — everything you need to grow, not just operate.
Is It Time?
Ask yourself honestly: how much of your current system's limitations have you just accepted as the cost of doing business?
The batch sync that means your website is never quite accurate. The B2B process that lives in a spreadsheet. The market expansion you keep deferring. The IT ticket queue that slows everything down.
None of that is inevitable. It's the cost of staying on infrastructure that wasn't built for where retail is today.
Shopify Plus was.
Book a free consultation and let's talk about what a migration from your current system would actually look like — timeline, scope, and what's involved. No pressure. Just an honest conversation.
Matagora is a top 1% Shopify Partner specializing in complex retail migrations, Shopify Plus implementations, and post-migration growth. Based in Montreal, working with retailers across North America and beyond.
