Society6 Shopify case study
How SDG rebuilt Society6 on Shopify Plus: an artist marketplace with 300M+ SKUs generated on the fly, a hybrid-headless storefront, and a headless Artist Studio, engineered on top of Shopify.
The end result embodies everything we set out to do: design an aesthetically beautiful, elevated, and functional website to give our customers a delightful experience with every click.
Overview
Society6 is one of the world's largest online art marketplaces, where independent artists sell their work printed across hundreds of product types, from art prints to furniture. Its scale, and its artist-first model, make it unlike any standard storefront.
SDG migrated Society6 from a bespoke custom platform onto Shopify Plus, and engineered the marketplace mechanics that make a catalog this vast possible on the platform.
The challenge
Society6's model breaks the assumptions most commerce platforms are built on. Every artwork can be applied to every product, producing a catalog far larger than any conventional store, and artists need their own tools to publish and sell.
- A catalog effectively in the hundreds of millions of SKUs, far beyond a conventional Shopify catalog.
- Artists who upload artwork and sell it across the full product range, in real time.
- A custom legacy platform to replace without losing the marketplace's depth or performance.
- Enterprise-grade search and discovery across an enormous, constantly changing catalog.
The solution
SDG rebuilt Society6 on Shopify Plus using a hybrid-headless approach we pioneered, headed where it adds speed and maintainability, headless where the marketplace demands it, and solved the catalog-scale problem with on-the-fly product creation.
- 300M+ SKUs made possible by generating products dynamically, on the fly, using Cart Transformations securely, rather than pre-creating an impossible catalog.
- A hybrid-headless architecture, the approach SDG pioneered on Shopify Plus.
- A headless Artist Studio where creators upload artwork and sell it across Society6's products, built entirely on top of Shopify.
- An enterprise Algolia integration powering search, browse, and discovery at marketplace scale.
Results & impact
SDG delivered the entire technical migration: front end and back end, ERP, OMS, PIM, CRM, and analytics, the hybrid-headless architecture, and all of the Shopify solutioning that makes a catalog this size work. Society6 now runs on Shopify Plus at a scale few believed the platform could support.
- A 60% average increase in add-to-cart rate.
- A 45% increase in mobile conversion rate.
- A dynamic catalog of 300M+ SKUs generated on the fly, served through a fast hybrid-headless storefront.
- A headless Artist Studio where creators publish and sell across the full product range, built natively on Shopify Plus.
The add-to-cart and mobile-conversion figures are from Shopify's published reporting on the project.
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