Better Music

About 20,000 active SKUs in the online catalogue
Around 20 supplier stock feeds brought into a consistent availability model
16 Celigo flows remapped across 3 endpoints
15-minute inventory synchronisation cycle
More than 140 product attributes organised within Shopify's 50-filter limit

The
Project

Platform

Shopify Plus

Services

UX/UI & CRO

Data Driven UX & UI

Mobile / Desktop

Data

SEO

Competitor Landscape Analysis

Keyword & Audience Research

SEO Migration

Technical Audits

Technical Optimisation

Development

Better Music is an independent music retailer in Canberra, serving everyone from first-time players to working musicians and audio professionals. Its online catalogue carries over 20,000 active SKUs, with stock coming from its physical store and around twenty suppliers. That specialist depth is a strength, but it also makes the commerce operation more complex than a typical single-store retailer.

Overdose had already built the Magento environment Better Music was ready to leave and later supported its Adobe Commerce upgrade work. The move to Shopify Plus was not simply a front-end refresh. Better Music wanted to lower the ongoing cost and effort of running the platform, modernise the customer experience and make day-to-day change easier, while protecting the systems and operational knowledge the business already relied on.

Together, Better Music and Overdose moved the store to Shopify Plus, remapped the existing NetSuite and Celigo integration, brought supplier feeds into a storefront-ready availability model, rebuilt promotional logic around the ERP and planned the cutover around staging tests and redirects. The launch was followed by stabilisation work and ongoing support through a growth retainer.

View website

Integrations

NetSuite remains Better Music's source of truth for product pricing and fulfillment. Rather than replace middleware the business had already invested in, the project remapped its existing Celigo setup from Adobe Commerce to Shopify Plus. Product, media, inventory, customer and order data move across those pipelines, with inventory synchronised on a fifteen-minute cycle.

Supplier stock sits outside that core pipeline. Around twenty feeds arrive in CSV or Excel through FTP, Dropbox and email, then pass through DataJet so different columns and availability conventions can be translated into a consistent structure for the storefront. Shopify Flow and Discount Kit support promotional rules without writing campaign pricing back into the catalogue. Elevar and Google Tag Manager provide the analytics layer, while Shippit supports shipping operations.

No items found.

Challenges  
+ Solutions

Challenge 01

Normalising Stock Data From Around Twenty Suppliers

Better Music sells stock from its own store alongside stock held by around twenty suppliers. Those suppliers report availability in different files, through different channels and to different definitions. Some provide exact quantities, some send a simple in-stock flag and some report volumes that are not useful as a promise to the customer. When a shopper drives to the store because the website shows stock that is not really available, the impact is felt at the counter, not in a data report.

SOLUTION

DataJet ingests the supplier feeds and brings their different column structures into a form Shopify can use. The storefront then translates that data into customer-facing availability rather than exposing unreliable exact counts. Messages such as “a few left” and “available” replace raw numbers, with separate thresholds for in-store and online stock. This approach respects the limits of the source data while giving customers a clearer, more defensible view of whether a product can be bought.

Challenge 02

Moving the Existing NetSuite Integration to Shopify Plus

Better Music already ran NetSuite as its ERP and Celigo as the middleware between ERP and storefront. Sixteen flows across three endpoints carried products, media, inventory, customers, orders and fulfillment. Those mappings were built for Adobe Commerce, so retiring the platform meant the integration layer had to be redirected without changing the source-of-truth decisions and operating habits behind it.

SOLUTION

The Celigo pipelines were remapped from Adobe Commerce to Shopify Plus, keeping NetSuite in control of pricing and fulfilment. Reusing the existing middleware avoided introducing another platform for the business to license, learn and maintain. It also kept the migration focused on translating the storefront boundary rather than redesigning the whole operating model. Inventory now runs on a fifteen-minute synchronisation cycle, reducing the gap between stock held in the business and availability presented online.

Challenge 03

Running Category Promotions Without Changing ERP Prices

Better Music regularly promotes whole categories, such as a percentage off electric guitars, and also wanted the flexibility to support bundles, spend-and-save offers and gifts with purchase. NetSuite could not automatically clear a special price when a campaign ended. Running promotions through the ERP would therefore create a manual export and re-import across thousands of products every time an offer changed, while any Shopify mechanism that rewrote catalogue prices risked interfering with the ERP sync.

SOLUTION

Promotional logic was kept away from the NetSuite price record. The first promotion on Shopify applied an automatic discount across 6,463 in-stock products, excluding gift cards. Shopify Flow tags products that are already marked down so they can be excluded from campaign collections and discounts do not stack. Discount Kit applies rule-based offers without writing into Shopify's price or compare-at fields, protecting the NetSuite synchronisation. Because native automatic discounts appear in the cart rather than on the product page, the experience is supported with sale badging and clear messaging about where the saving will be applied.

Challenge 04

Protecting Organic Search During the Migration

Better Music's organic visibility had been built across about 20,000 active products, category pages and content on an Adobe Commerce URL structure. Replatforming changes those addresses at scale. Any old URL without a deliberate destination risks losing its accumulated search value and sending customers to a dead end, making redirects one of the most consequential parts of the launch.

SOLUTION

URL mapping and redirects were prepared ahead of cutover and treated as a launch dependency, not a post-launch clean-up task. The redirects were loaded before traffic moved, then checked in staging between the final merge and the DNS change. This gave the migration a controlled handover from the Adobe Commerce URL structure to Shopify Plus and reduced avoidable disruption for customers and search engines following existing links.

Challenge 05

Organising Navigation Around How Musicians Shop

Musicians do not always browse through neat retail categories. A guitarist may look for a “Strat” rather than a “solid body guitar”, while brass, recording and live-sound customers use different product language again. A simplified menu might look cleaner but would remove the depth specialist customers use to get to the right family of products quickly.

SOLUTION

The navigation was designed around those different shopping behaviours. A four-column mega menu provides detailed category paths, with consistent columns for popular brands and categories and configurable columns for instrument-specific series, models or accessories. Mobile category navigation keeps important destinations visible above the fold, while the Shopify theme editor gives Better Music control over how each category is presented. The result balances specialist depth with a structure the internal team can continue to manage.

Challenge 06

Managing More Than 140 Product Attributes in Shopify

An instrument catalogue carries a long tail of technical attributes, from pickup configuration and string count to wattage and frequency response. Better Music's product model included more than 140 metafields, while Shopify limited the number of storefront filters that could be used. Carrying everything across without prioritisation would make the customer experience noisy and the admin harder to maintain.

SOLUTION

The project organised metafields by product category and prioritised the attributes that genuinely help customers narrow a choice. Structured dropdown values reduce inconsistent naming, category mappings keep irrelevant fields out of the admin view and the selected attributes support clearer product specifications and filtering. This preserved the depth expected from a specialist retailer while working within Shopify's filter constraints and giving Better Music a cleaner approach to ongoing catalogue management.

Designing for Specialist Product Research

The design work started with the way Better Music's customers shop. New players need clear entry points into major categories. Experienced musicians often arrive with a precise model, specification or piece of terminology in mind. The experience therefore had to support discovery without flattening the catalogue into generic retail groupings.

On mobile, category shortcuts keep high-intent destinations visible early in the journey. On desktop, the mega menu retains enough depth for instrument-specific browsing, with category language that reflects how musicians describe the products. A flexible block system in Shopify gives the Better Music team room to change promotional and category content without returning to development for every update.

Product data follows the same principle. Category-aware metafields and prioritised filters bring technical detail into a more usable structure, helping customers compare products while reducing clutter for the team maintaining the catalogue. The visual direction keeps Better Music's scale and specialist authority visible, while the underlying system gives the business more day-to-day control.

CLIENT
LoVE

Moving from Adobe Commerce to Shopify Plus was a significant change for us. We have a detailed product catalogue, stock coming from many suppliers and a NetSuite integration that is central to how we operate. Overdose understood that complexity and worked through the migration with our team, rather than treating it like a standard replatform. We now have a storefront that is easier to manage and a platform we can keep improving.

Johnny, Head of Digital, Better Music