Party City's ecommerce site ran on a legacy commerce platform that was expensive to maintain and did not have a modern suite of omnichannel capabilities. Migrating to Shopify meant preserving every existing business rule, workflow, and operational function, without disrupting day-to-day business.

Party City was focused on increasing website performance while decreasing the run cost and operational overhead of maintaining its commerce site. This meant the team needed better capabilities to support SEO performance, search visibility, page optimization, and the overall customer experience. Better content management and simpler site administration were also essential.

The risk in any platform migration is what might break in the process. Merkle’s first priority was continuity: transferring business data, product catalogs, customer information, and operational workflows from the legacy commerce platform to Shopify without interrupting the business. To connect the new platform with the other systems Party City depended on, Merkle built middleware in AWS using NodeJS to handle third-party service integrations and Shopify OMS tasks. Party City's site stayed fully operational throughout the migration, with orders processing and customers checking out without noticing a change. 

With the foundation secure, Merkle focused on strengthening the platform where it mattered most to Party City's business. Shopify's native capabilities streamlined the management of pricing, inventory, and product variations. Checkout became more flexible, with new fulfillment options, simplified login capabilities, personalized promotions, scheduling, and additional payment methods giving customers more ways to complete a purchase and track their orders. Behind the scenes, real-time inventory validation, OMS-driven workflows, and fraud prevention improved operational efficiency and post-order support, allowing the Party City team to scale revenue and orders through their online channel. 

Merkle built Shopify as a shared technical and functional foundation from the start, designed to extend across other Ad Populum brands as the portfolio grows.

Party City's ecommerce site now runs on Shopify, with all the business-critical data, workflows, and functionality carried over and improved. Merchandising is more flexible, checkout is more personalized, and operations run more efficiently, all while lowering the cost of Party City’s online channel.

With a scalable Shopify foundation in place, other Ad Populum brands can follow the same migration path, giving the portfolio a shared commerce platform to build on as customer expectations continue to evolve.