Why Growing DTC Brands Keep Choosing Shopify
Why DTC Brands Are Moving to Shopify
Most enterprise ecommerce platforms were built to handle complexity. Shopify was built to remove it. For DTC brands in the $5M to $40M range evaluating platforms, the difference isn't just technical. It's how fast marketing can move, how well the ecosystem connects, and how much of the platform's capability the team can actually use without an IT-led implementation that stretches across quarters. That's why growing brands keep landing here.
When a brand starts outgrowing its current ecommerce platform the conversation usually goes one of two ways.
The first is an IT conversation. What can the platform handle? What does the migration look like? How long will it take and what will it cost?
The second is a marketing conversation. What does this platform unlock? How fast can we move? What does the ecosystem look like and who builds on it?
Most legacy platforms, like Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and BigCommerce, were designed to answer the first question. They're built for technical teams, implementation partners, and enterprises with the budget and bandwidth to manage significant platform complexity.
Shopify was built to answer the second.
That distinction matters more than most brands realize when they're evaluating platforms. The platform you choose isn't just an infrastructure decision. It's a decision about how fast your marketing team can execute, how well your tech stack connects, and how much of your budget goes toward building the platform versus building the business.
What Legacy Platforms Get Wrong for DTC Brands
Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and similar enterprise platforms have real strengths. They're highly customizable, handle complex catalog structures, and have been around long enough to have deep implementation ecosystems.
They also come with tradeoffs that hit DTC brands particularly hard.
Platform migrations are measured in months, not weeks. Once you're live, marketing changes still require developer resources. And while some enterprise platforms offer native marketing tooling, connecting to the broader ecosystem DTC brands depend on — Klaviyo, loyalty platforms, subscription tools, attribution — typically requires custom development work that compounds over time.
For a brand with a 200-person engineering team, that's manageable. For a brand with a lean internal team and a handful of agency relationships, it's a significant drag on speed and agility.
Why Shopify Wins for Marketing Teams
The reason DTC brands keep landing on Shopify isn't just simplicity. It's what the platform specifically unlocks for marketing and how fast those capabilities can actually be deployed.
Checkout extensibility.
Shopify gives marketing teams direct control over the checkout experience: upsells and cross-sells at checkout, loyalty point redemption, custom form fields, branded flows built around specific customer journeys. On legacy platforms, checkout customization typically requires significant development work. On Shopify, it's a marketing function. The brands consistently winning on AOV are doing it here.
The ecosystem is unmatched.
The integrations that matter most to DTC marketing teams: Klaviyo, Nosto, Yotpo, Gorgias, Triple Whale, and dozens more were built for Shopify first. They work better, connect faster, and are maintained more actively than on any other platform. The difference in ecosystem depth isn't marginal. It's significant enough to change the tools available to the marketing team.
Multi-storefront without rebuilding.
One backend. Multiple front-end experiences. For brands expanding internationally, managing multiple sub-brands, or running B2B and DTC simultaneously, multi-storefront removes the need to rebuild infrastructure for each market or segment. Legacy platforms typically require separate instances, separate maintenance, separate costs, and separate complexity.
Native B2B functionality.
Net terms, company accounts, custom pricing tiers, quantity rules, and a dedicated B2B storefront built in. For brands where wholesale is the core business, and DTC is the growth opportunity, this changes the operational picture significantly. B2B and DTC under one roof, one backend, one customer data layer. No separate system. No custom development to connect them.
Speed of execution.
Marketing teams on Shopify can move faster. Landing pages, campaign launches, site updates, A/B tests. The platform is built for teams that need to execute quickly without waiting on development queues. On legacy platforms, that speed is the exception. On Shopify, it's the default.
What the Migration Actually Looks Like
The most common objection to replatforming is the migration itself. It's a legitimate concern. A poorly executed migration can disrupt revenue, damage SEO, and create technical debt that takes years to unwind.
But the cost of staying on the wrong platform compounds too. Every month on a platform that slows down marketing execution, limits ecosystem integrations, and requires disproportionate engineering resources is a month of drag on the business.
The brands that migrate to Shopify and get it right tend to treat the migration as a growth decision, not an IT project. The technical work exists regardless. What separates a smooth migration from a difficult one is whether the strategy, the SEO plan, the ecosystem architecture, the data migration, were defined before the build started.
That's where 1r's Discovery process comes in. Before any design or development work begins, 1r leads a structured Discovery engagement designed to align business goals, customer experience, technical requirements, and platform capabilities. The process helps define key decisions around site architecture, integrations, data migration, SEO considerations, user journeys, and operational workflows, while identifying opportunities to improve conversion and streamline internal processes. By the time the build begins, the team has a clear strategic roadmap, prioritized requirements, and a shared understanding of what success looks like, reducing surprises and creating a more efficient path to launch.
When 1r Agency led the migration for VIOLET GREY, the project ran simultaneously with a warehouse migration and ERP integration, requiring precise coordination across Shopify, NetSuite, and a new 3PL. The result: gross revenue up 53% year over year, AOV up 38%, and sessions up 22% after launch. That outcome didn't come from the platform alone. It came from treating the migration as a strategic initiative rather than a technical one.
Function of Beauty presented a different kind of complexity. A custom platform with subscriptions making up 80% of the brand's business. The migration required building a system that let customers manage and customize their formulas without going through checkout again. The platform made it possible. The strategy made it work. The site drove 30,000+ quiz completions in its first week with a 73% quiz completion rate.
For Makeup by Mario, the challenge was building a digital foundation strong enough to support a rapidly expanding brand without disrupting the momentum already in place. The migration gave the team a platform they could actually grow on — faster execution, cleaner integrations, and a site experience built around how their customers shop.
What Brands Actually Build Once They're There
The platform unlocks a lot. What gets built on it depends entirely on how the decision was made.
Brands that moved to Shopify for IT reasons tend to rebuild what they had. Brands that moved for growth reasons tend to build something meaningfully better. Checkout experiences that lift AOV, B2B storefronts that don't embarrass the brand, lifecycle marketing infrastructure that was impossible to connect on the previous platform, and international storefronts that actually work.
The platform is the same either way. The outcome depends on the strategy behind it.
1r Agency is a Shopify Platinum Partner with over 16 years of experience. If you're evaluating platforms or planning a migration and want to make sure the strategy is in place before the build starts, we'd love to talk. [hello@1r.agency]
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