Read's Uniforms

B2C

Read's Uniforms

Establishing a high-performance B2C foundation on Shopify Plus

Objective

Building a high-performance, frictionless Shopify foundation

Based in North Carolina, with 19 brick and mortar stores across the United States, Read's Uniforms is a family owned uniform retailer that wanted to elevate the online experience of their customers to match their excellent in person experience. The decision to migrate was also driven by significant pain points with their previous WooCommerce site, which suffered from mounting technical debt, a slow user experience, poor search capabilities, and a weak checkout process that frustrated customers and hindered business growth. Symmetry Commerce's main focus was to build a fast, reliable, and easy-to-shop website that mirrors their current core capabilities, including integration of their payroll deduction middleware, but significantly improves the user experience through a frictionless checkout, better search functionality, and more intuitive product detail pages.

Impacts

30,000 Products Migrated

100,000+ Customers Migrated

4,000+ Orders Migrated

Transformation

Advanced payroll automation and seamless middleware integration

The new site results in a faster load time, and an improved look and feasibility of the overall shopping experience. A critical component of this success was the seamless integration of Read's Uniforms' custom middleware; rather than rebuilding the system from scratch, this was repointed directly to Shopify's API endpoints. Symmetry Commerce successfully configured the complex payroll deduction rules into the new Shopify Plus checkout by utilizing Shopify's checkout extensibility and Metaobjects. This custom configuration ensures that the checkout dynamically displays a dropdown of eligible hospitals based on strict active date windows, enforces specific maximum spend limits, and dictates the exact number of allowed pay periods based on each facility's unique logic. Ultimately, by executing this focused strategy, the project delivered a robust, highly functional B2C platform that perfectly handles their unique medical industry requirements while establishing a clean foundation for future growth.

Challenges

Severe Site Performance and Stability Issues

The WooCommerce site suffered from significant speed and performance issues that negatively impacted the customer experience.

Highly Manual Order Fulfillment & Slow Inventory Syncing

Their existing backend workflows required highly inefficient, manual data entry. Furthermore, their inventory syncing was severely delayed, with some vendor feeds taking up to 48 hours to refresh.

Poor Search Capabilities and Frustrating UX

The previous site was using a search tool plugin, which ended up being a major drop-off point where customers abandoned the site. Additionally, the product detail pages created serious friction, particularly around selecting complex variations like pant lengths (regular, petite, and tall).

Results

Advanced Search and Product Discovery The new site uses the Shopify Search and Discovery app. This immediately improves the user experience by offering robust filtering options, semantic search, and better product matching.

Frictionless Checkout and Enhanced PDPs The new site leverages Shopify Plus’s highly optimized, fast-converting checkout architecture. Furthermore, the PDPs have been restructured to eliminate customer confusion. The new design consolidates colour and size selections into a much more intuitive, frictionless flow to reduce purchasing errors and subsequent return rates.

Automated Inventory Syncing and Fulfillment Workflows The new architecture allows the site to automatically update inventory levels to prevent overselling, seamlessly create new products, and instantly pull Advanced Shipping Notifications (ASNs) to update customer tracking details for drop-shipped orders.