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Hedonism Wines: Replatforming Strategy for an 80,000-SKU Luxury Wine Merchant
Platform strategy, architecture options and a phased delivery plan for a Mayfair wine and spirits merchant preparing to move from a bespoke Drupal stack to Shopify Plus.
Project Summary
Hedonism Wines is a luxury wine and spirits merchant in London’s Mayfair, selling worldwide from a catalog of more than 80,000 SKUs on a bespoke Drupal storefront. The business set out to replatform onto Shopify Plus with a stated goal of doubling online revenue within 24 months, while preserving the boutique-cellar character that defines the brand.
Hedonism did not need another Shopify Plus recommendation. It needed to know whether Shopify Plus could accommodate an 80,000+ SKU business without turning its ERP, pricing logic and international operations into a custom-development programme.
Elogic Commerce’s role was strategic and architectural: assessing Shopify Plus against the existing Drupal setup, defining architecture options, planning the migration, and identifying the technical and commercial risks that needed resolution before implementation. Elogic Commerce was not the implementation partner for the build.
The engagement focused on making the trade-offs explicit rather than forcing a single architecture before the underlying constraints had been validated. On the two decisions that mattered most, the frontend architecture and the ERP integration, Elogic Commerce presented options with costs and consequences attached.
Key Outcomes
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criteria architecture decision framework comparing Shopify Online Store 2.0 against headless Hydrogen
4
UX scenarios implementation routes from theme configuration to a fully custom build, assessed against effort and budget
MVP + post-MVP
delivery structure separating launch-critical capabilities from the longer-term roadmap
4
material risks identified with mitigation plans before implementation, including the undocumented ERP
About the Client
Hedonism Wines operates from Mayfair in London and ships worldwide. The catalog runs to more than 80,000 SKUs across wine and spirits, much of it rare and high value, and the commercial model carries requirements that a standard retail storefront does not: duty-paid versus in-bond pricing, bonded stock across warehouses, age verification, multi-currency taxes and shipping, and identity verification on high-value orders under UK regulations.
The business described its ambition for the replatforming as “caterpillar to butterfly”: preserve the core structure and design that carry the brand, resolve the technical and UX problems that had accumulated, and launch something tested, documented and supportable without damaging SEO, data or customer experience along the way.
Project Complexity
Business Challenge
01
A revenue target attached to a platform decision
Doubling online revenue in 24 months is a commercial objective, not a technical one. The platform work either serves it or it doesn’t, which makes the sequencing of features a revenue question rather than an engineering preference.
02
Brand equity that constrains the redesign
The existing site carries the brand. A replatforming that improved the technology while losing the boutique-cellar feel would be a net loss.
03
Commerce requirements beyond standard platform capabilities
In-bond versus duty-paid pricing, bonded stock and high-value KYC are not configuration problems. How they map onto Shopify Plus determines how much custom development the programme requires.
04
An undocumented ERP as the central dependency
Product, pricing, stock and order data all flow through Vintner. Without documentation or a known integration path, the single largest technical risk sat outside the storefront entirely.
05
A feature list far larger than a first release
The requested scope spanned resale valuation, En Primeur, personal cellar dashboards, AI search, cryptocurrency payments, click and collect and more. Treating all of them as first-release requirements would have materially increased scope and delivery risk.
06
SEO and data equity at risk in the move
A long-established Drupal site carries rankings and organic traffic that a careless migration destroys permanently.
Elogic Commerce's Strategic Work
Frontend architecture: two viable paths, compared honestly
There was no universally correct architecture here. The decision depended on the relative importance of time to market, UX control, performance, app dependency, maintenance complexity and technical debt. Rather than recommending a single approach, Elogic Commerce set out both viable options and compared them on the criteria that would actually drive the decision.
Shopify Online Store 2.0 with Liquid and a customized theme offers faster time to market, lower initial budget and simpler maintenance, at the cost of medium UX control, high app dependency and a higher technical debt risk arising from app accumulation. Headless Hydrogen on Next.js with server-side rendering offered greater frontend control, a stronger path to performance optimization at scale, wider composable integration and reduced reliance on third-party theme apps, at the cost of a longer timeline, higher initial budget and greater maintenance complexity.
Elogic Commerce compared the two approaches across eight criteria, including time to market, budget, UX control, app dependency, performance, maintenance complexity and technical debt risk. The comparison made the trade-offs explicit so the client could evaluate the architecture against its commercial priorities.
UX implementation scenarios, costed
Elogic Commerce set out four routes to the storefront design, each with an indicative hours range: theme configuration with light customization, theme plus medium customization, fully custom UX from Figma, and fully custom UX built on the client’s existing design.
Elogic Commerce’s assessment was that the fourth suited Hedonism best, since it preserves the existing branding and style guide while improving UX, CRO and navigation. The recommended entry point was a CRO audit generating hypotheses against the highest-converting pages, so redesign effort could be concentrated where it would move revenue rather than spread evenly across the site.
ERP integration: the dependency that shapes everything else
Elogic Commerce identified the Vintner integration as the programme’s critical path. The platform decision could not be separated from the ERP question: until the available Vintner integration methods and critical data flows were proven, any Shopify implementation estimate remained materially uncertain. A dedicated connector or integration service would be required to exchange catalog, stock, price, order and status data between the ERP and Shopify, regardless of which frontend architecture was selected. Even migrating away from self-hosted Drupal, some components remain self-hosted.
Because no formal ERP documentation existed, the initial estimate used direct database access as a working assumption, while explicitly flagging that assumption for validation and asking what connection methods the ERP actually supports. The proposed mitigation was to analyze any existing integration code and build a proof of concept for the critical data flows during discovery, before the estimate hardened into a commitment.
Catalog migration approach
For the 80,000-plus SKUs, Elogic Commerce proposed extracting and mapping all product data from Vintner, creating the metafields and attributes needed for compatibility, staging and validating the import in a controlled environment before go-live, and running QA against data integrity, inventory accuracy and performance.
Phased delivery, MVP first
Elogic Commerce structured the programme into a work breakdown separating MVP scope, the must-have features for a first release, from post-MVP scope carrying the advanced capabilities. The implementation sequence separated discovery and integration validation from feature delivery, with critical ERP data flows proven early and broader integration work sequenced around the MVP.
Risks named before contract, not after
Four material risks were documented with mitigations attached: no ERP documentation, mitigated by code analysis, proofs of concept and a cooperation agreement with the ERP vendor; app conflicts and performance overhead under the theme approach, mitigated by an app audit and custom development where total cost of ownership is lower; complex pricing and promotion rules, mitigated by clarifying business rules and building a dedicated connector module; and SEO and content migration from Drupal, mitigated by redirect mapping, canonical setup and a technical SEO programme.
Additional strategic considerations
Elogic Commerce also set out two routes for the KPI dashboard covering traffic, conversion, revenue, AOV, CAC, RFM, LTV and retention: a GA4-centric fast track delivering in four to six weeks, or a warehouse-first build over six to ten weeks giving accurate CAC and LTV, RFM segmentation and cross-channel attribution at higher setup cost.
The resulting recommendation
Validate the highest-risk assumptions before committing to implementation: document the business flows against Shopify Plus capabilities, analyze the existing ERP integration code and prove the critical data flows, complete the app gap analysis identifying where to use apps and where to build custom, and then finalize the stack decision and release plan.
Capabilities Demonstrated
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Replatforming strategy for large-catalog specialist retail
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Shopify Plus architecture assessment, including headless versus theme trade-off analysis
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ERP integration architecture under incomplete documentation
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Large-catalog migration planning with data integrity and QA strategy
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Commerce logic mapping for regulated categories, including duty and bonded stock
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Internationalisation planning across multiple regional storefronts
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MVP scoping and phased delivery sequencing against a fixed date
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Analytics and KPI dashboard architecture
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Risk identification and mitigation planning ahead of contract
When This Solution Is a Good Fit
01
You have a platform decision to make and want the options compared rather than a single recommendation handed down.02
Your integration landscape is poorly documented and you would rather find that out during discovery than during build.03
You can separate a first release from a roadmap, and hold that line once it's drawn.04
You want risks named before contract, including the ones that make an estimate uncertain.05
Your brand constrains the design, and you need UX improvement without brand disruption.Planning a Replatforming?
If you're weighing a move to Shopify Plus with a large catalog, an ERP dependency and commerce requirements beyond platform defaults, the decisions that determine the outcome are made before development starts. Talk to Elogic Commerce about replatforming strategy.