The Results
The Challenge
Polyvinyl Records had run its direct-to-consumer business on a fully custom CMS for 15 years. Not a commercial platform: a hand-built system where every new feature required writing code from scratch, and where the institutional knowledge of how everything fit together lived with a single developer.
When that developer stepped back, the decision that followed was not simply about technology. The real question was how to replace something that 15 years of incremental customization had made irreplaceable in-house. One path was hiring and onboarding someone who could learn the system: Shopify's case study describes that process as six to twelve months of ramp time before a new developer would be productive. The other path was moving to a platform that handled the underlying infrastructure by default, so the team could focus on selling records instead of maintaining servers.
There was a second gap that no developer hire would have fixed. The custom platform had no modern merchandising layer. No recommendation engine, no upsell or cross-sell logic, no way to turn a completed checkout into another touchpoint without building the feature from scratch. Polyvinyl has a catalog of more than 400 releases spanning multiple decades and interconnected artist rosters. The commercial infrastructure to act on any of that did not exist.
The Solution
The migration took nine months. Softlimit rebuilt what the custom CMS had done for a decade and a half, and added what it had never been able to do.
The new store runs on Shopify Plus with native checkout, Shop Pay, and Shopify Payments. DTC and B2B are unified in a single storefront, ending the operational friction of managing them separately. Custom bundle logic and digital download fulfillment sit alongside physical orders in the same system. Artist management runs through Shopify Metaobjects, which means catalog structure can grow without developer involvement. Enhanced filtering and a mega menu surface a deep catalog without overwhelming the shopper.
Rebuy was part of the architecture from the first conversation. As soon as migration planning began, the team started mapping personalization across every touchpoint: product pages, collection pages, recently viewed items, cart upsells, checkout extensions, and post-purchase offers. Within Polyvinyl's catalog, the relationships between artists give Rebuy particularly strong signal to work with: a fan of one label act is a likely buyer of another, and the store can act on that.
The detail that made it into both third-party case studies is the post-purchase mystery vinyl offer: a discounted record placed immediately after checkout, where the buyer does not find out what they ordered until it arrives. Chris Hassen, Director of Operations at Polyvinyl, described it in Rebuy's case study this way: “We've been joking that people actually prefer not to know what they're getting.”
The Results, In Full
Polyvinyl launched on Shopify Plus in January 2025. The results since launch are documented by Shopify and Rebuy in independently published accounts.
Revenue grew 20% year over year since launch, per Shopify's case study. The store's conversion rate reached 3.88%, which Shopify describes as approximately twice the indie ecommerce average.
The personalization layer performed at the same level. Per Rebuy's case study, the mystery vinyl post-purchase offer converted at 15% over a six-month measurement period. AOV lifted 8.25% over the 30 days covered in Rebuy's case study.
Matt Lunsford, President and Co-Founder of Polyvinyl, described the outcome in Shopify's case study: “Working with Softlimit has been phenomenal. We needed a really helpful guide who could show us all of the ins and outs of what Shopify is capable of.”
Softlimit remains on retainer.
As Told by Shopify and Rebuy
Two independent accounts of this project are published by Shopify and Rebuy. Both are cited throughout this page.
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Case Study / Music
