Today we had one of our biggest, most anti-climatic launches in my time at Primary. We moved our entire homegrown site to @ShopifyPlus. It took about a year to migrate, and, mostly, no one even noticed a difference when we shipped this morning.

When I've spoken to people in Tech about this, responses range from raised eyebrows to "what why?!" So, I wanted to take this moment to talk a little about how we made the decision to switch, both technically and philosophically.

So the first thing to know is we have a small (relative to some other ecomm companies) team of 8 engineers and 2 designers, who until today were responsible for maintaining and evolving basically an entire end-to-end ecomm experience.

Primary started with an off-the-shelf backend, but had created extremely deep workarounds, integrations and customizations that made it difficult not only to improve, but to diagnose when things went wrong.

There's *so* much we wanted to do and work on, but half our time was dedicated to investigating and fixing what we already had, so our progress was slow. Not to mention any new third party we wanted to integrate with was a whole thing (switching ESPs was a big oof).

Additionally, because we hadn't forked the off the shelf backend, we weren't receiving updates. So our software was behind, and quickly approaching an inflection point, past which we'd face very serious security concerns if we didn't spend a ton of time upgrading.

So, we had to make a decision about the future of the platform: do we spend time upgrading/overhauling what's there? Or pursue a new platform? Speaking personally, the answer to me seemed pretty simple.

Will Primary benefit from our team spending time on things like the checkout backend or user management/security? Is that where we think we can innovate and really build a moat right now? What could we accomplish if we never worried about those things again?

Shopify, in a lot of ways, feels like core ecomm infrastructure to me. The same way AWS made it so we didn't have to run our own physical servers, Shopify takes away a lot of the core concerns in ecommerce, while also giving you a ton of flexibility to do what you need.

We're doing some pretty custom/wild stuff in there and it's working (mostly, first day jitters and all that!). And once we're stable, our roadmap is now entirely about improving things for customers! And the eng team is so relieved to get to focus on what matters.

The pushback I've gotten in the past year from outside engineers I've talked to has been about Shopify meaning less interesting engineering problems to solve for the team. Honestly, I feel like that's relative to the engineers you hire.

Do your engineers value working on customer problems? Do they care about creating value for the business? Ours do, and we've also come to realize there are still plenty of meaty technical issues to solve. It feels good to finally launch and be on a much more solid path.