OpenCart had run out of road
The store worked, but the options for optimising it were thin. Reshaping the storefront, the structure or the way customers search meant fighting the platform or paying for an extension that only half fitted.
Kosev Service
1,300 products migrated
Kosev Service WooCommerce
THE PROBLEM
1,300 products nobody could find, and labels typed by hand.
A garden equipment retailer selling chainsaw and lawnmower parts alongside complete machines, running on an ageing OpenCart store that had run out of room to improve.
WHAT WAS WRONG
Two problems
Shipping labels created by hand
Every order meant manually producing a shipping label. On a store this size that is not an annoyance, it is a daily job that scales with success.
WHAT I BUILT
The work
01
WEEK 1
Mapping 1,300 products
Every product and category written down before anything moved, so nothing arrived in the wrong place.
WEEK 1
Mapping 1,300 products
Every product and category written down before anything moved, so nothing arrived in the wrong place.
WEEKS 1 TO 2
A menu people can use
The hardest part of the project was deciding where each product belongs. A customer looking for a chainsaw part should find it where they expect, not where the warehouse files it.
WEEKS 2 TO 4
Search, filters and sorting
A custom filter plugin and a custom sorting plugin, because the ready-made ones did not fit a catalogue shaped like this.
WEEK 5
Labels without typing
Shipping label generation automated, so orders leave without anyone producing paperwork by hand.
WEEK 6
Migrated and live
Products, categories and structure moved across to WooCommerce, tested, then launched.
THE RESULT
What changed
1,300 products migrated with their categories intact
Shipping labels generated automatically instead of by hand
Products reorganised into categories customers actually search
Custom filtering and sorting built for this catalogue
A store that can be changed instead of one that cannot
Six weeks from start to live
WORTH KNOWING
Notes
Why move off OpenCart?
OpenCart was not broken, it was finished. Every improvement they wanted ran into the same limits. WooCommerce asks more of the owner and gives far more back.
What was actually hard?
Not the migration. Deciding where 1,300 products belong in a menu so customers find them is the work that takes judgement.
Is it harder for them to manage now?
More complex than what they had, yes. But they can change things now, which they could not before.
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See it live
kosevservice.bg↗