For 35 years, Trainers Warehouse has sold tools that make corporate training and team building effective for corporate trainers, workforce development professionals, and educators.Â
Through their ecommerce site, Trainers Warehouse delivers L&D games, facilitation tools, and hundreds of other products developed by educators and L&D professionals and built around brain science. The Massachusetts company is family-owned, women-owned, and ships to corporate clients, schools, and government agencies across the country, and has spent decades building a catalog most competitors can't match.
Behind that catalog was an ecommerce stack most retailers would recognize immediately: BigCommerce on the front end, MOM running order and inventory management on the back end, and a growing list of disconnected tools stitched together to keep the two talking to each other.
Client Snapshot
- Industry: Corporate training, team building, and facilitation products
- Source platforms: BigCommerce (storefront), MOM (order and inventory management)
- Project type: Full Service Shopify Plus migration
- Company stage: Established, ready for a leaner, more efficient, and economical operating model
Why Trainers Warehouse Wanted Out of BigCommerce and MOM
The decision to migrate from BigCommerce to Shopify wasn't driven by one single event. Rather, the team at Trainers Warehouse was experiencing a handful of pressures landing at the same time.
MOM had become what the team started calling their "golden handcuffs." The system had been locked in for years, software support had effectively stopped, and every workaround the team built to keep it functional added more fragility, not less.Â
BigCommerce, meanwhile, wasn't keeping pace with Shopify, particularly on the app ecosystem and the pace of new features.Â
Trainers Warehouse also needed an operation their team could run without a specialist babysitting every system.Â
Consolidating onto one platform that could grow with them, and that their own team could manage without a developer on call, became the priority.
How Trainers Warehouse Found Whirlwind
Trainers Warehouse heard about Whirlwind Ecommerce from word-of-mouth referrals from previous ecommerce projects. At the same time, Whirlwind had been actively participating in a MOM user community, answering questions and talking through platform options with other merchants stuck in the same golden handcuffs.Â
The combination of trusted referral plus trusted advice inside a community made Trainers confident that Whirlwind was the right agency to support their Shopify migration project.Â
What the Feasibility Analysis Found
Every WE migration starts with a feasibility analysis before a single product moves. For Trainers Warehouse, that meant a full spreadsheet mapping every function running in MOM and BigCommerce against what Shopify could handle natively, and what would need a custom build.
Two gaps stood out immediately.
- Bundled and composite products. A large share of the Trainers Warehouse catalog is sold as bundles and kits, sets of Thumballs, facilitation kits, and multi-piece training packages that can be customized. This gap turned into a custom solution built specifically for how Trainers Warehouse manages inventory and supplier relationships across bundled SKUs.
- Marketplace connections. Trainers Warehouse wanted to sell through Amazon and Walmart alongside their own site, without running three separate order queues and three separate inventory counts.
The Results: How Whirlwind Made it Easier to Sell
The migration wasn't just a lift-and-shift of the same store onto a new platform. It was a chance to remove the operational drag the team had been living with for years. Throughout the process, Whirlwind was able to help make it easier for Trainers Warehouse to sell online with:
Unified commerce across every channel. Orders from the Shopify storefront, B2B accounts, Amazon, and Walmart now land in one management queue instead of three or four disconnected ones. The team, including call center staff who enter orders on behalf of customers, works from a single system instead of switching between platforms depending on where an order came in.
Theme control without a developer. Content and layout changes that used to require a dev ticket in BigCommerce can now be made directly by the Trainers Warehouse team inside Shopify's theme editor. That alone removes a recurring cost and a recurring wait.
One system instead of a patchwork. Tools that had been bolted onto MOM and BigCommerce over the years are now consolidated inside Shopify's ecosystem, cutting the number of logins, subscriptions, and integration points the team has to maintain.
What We Built: Easier to Buy
Shopify solved the back-end sprawl, but the front end website still needed work to make it easier to buy.Â
Our CRO team rebuilt the shopping experience around three things:Â
- Clearer taxonomy so customers can actually find the right product category
- Persona-based content strategy built around who's buying (trainers, HR leads, educators, facilitators) and what they're trying to solve
- Simplified product detail pages for a catalog that had grown complex over 35 years
One feature came directly out of that persona work: a build-your-own-bundle experience modeled on questions like "what's my communication style," letting customers assemble a custom kit instead of hunting through dozens of individual product pages to build one themselves.
Our branding team also modernized the visual brand strategy, resulting in a front-end experience that was more aligned with their ideal buyers.
By preserving SEO and CRO throughout the migration process, our team made sure that Trainers Warehouse was able to maintain traffic and sales.
The time it took to migrate from BigCommerce to Shopify with a full-service migration complete with custom solutions for product bundles was approximately 16 weeks from onboarding to launch.
What This Means If You're Still Running BigCommerce
Trainers Warehouse isn't alone in their frustrations with BigCommerce plus MOM: most of the BigCommerce clients we work with want better design flexibility without paying a developer for every change, cheaper and easier access to the app ecosystem, and one place to manage orders across every channel instead of a system for each one.
If your team is managing bundled products, multiple sales channels, or a legacy order management system that nobody at your company can fully explain anymore, that's usually a sign the platform is costing more in workarounds than it would cost to migrate.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you migrate bundled or composite products from BigCommerce to Shopify?
Shopify doesn't support composite products natively, so bundled and kitted items need a custom solution built around your specific inventory and supplier setup. This is one of the most common gaps in BigCommerce migrations and should be scoped during the feasibility phase, not discovered after launch.
Can Shopify manage orders from Amazon and Walmart alongside your own store?
Yes. With the right integration setup, orders from Amazon, Walmart, B2B accounts, and your DTC storefront can land in a single management queue instead of separate systems for each channel.
What happens to a legacy order management system like MOM during a Shopify migration?
A feasibility analysis maps every function the legacy system handles against what Shopify supports natively, so nothing gets lost in the move and any gaps get a custom solution before launch instead of after.
Ready to Leave the Golden Handcuffs Behind?
If your BigCommerce and legacy order management setup is starting to feel more like maintenance than a growth engine, we'll walk through what a migration would actually involve, no obligation. Contact Whirlwind Ecommerce, a certified Shopify Plus partner, for a no obligation quote for your migration.Â