Rainbow Shops Shopify case study
How SDG helped Rainbow Shops move a thousand-store fashion business from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify, giving a lean engineering team enterprise scale without enterprise drag.
Overview
Rainbow Shops has sold affordable, size-inclusive fashion since 1935 and now operates more than a thousand US stores. Online, a team of only three full-time engineers competes with retailers supported by dramatically larger technology organizations.
After roughly a decade on Demandware, now Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Rainbow worked with SDG to move to Shopify and regain the ability to ship at the speed of its ideas.
The challenge
The legacy platform had shifted from an innovation engine into a constraint. New features were slow and costly, mobile apps were out of reach, and platform overhead made it difficult for a small team to keep pace with the largest names in commerce.
- De-risk a high-stakes enterprise replatform.
- Reduce platform cost and ongoing maintenance.
- Let a three-person engineering team deliver meaningful customer features quickly.
- Improve discovery and checkout without rebuilding commodity infrastructure.
The solution
SDG moved Rainbow Shops to Shopify's managed commerce foundation, pairing a fast checkout and extensible ecosystem with the integrations needed by a retailer of this scale.
- Migration from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify.
- Native mobile apps that now account for a meaningful share of customer interactions.
- Google Cloud Discovery AI integration for stronger site search.
- A release model where features can move in minutes rather than months.
Results & impact
Shopify reports an 80% reduction in platform fees, a 48% increase in site-search volume after the Google Cloud integration, and native apps accounting for 20% of customer interactions.
The larger result is operating leverage: a lean team can focus on customer-facing innovation while Shopify carries the undifferentiated burden of platform scale.
On the record
Shopify documented Rainbow Shops' replatform and measured impact:
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