Alfred Music
Alfred Music Modernizes Their Commerce with Shopify
Alfred Music needed a more modern ecommerce foundation to support continued growth and improve day-to-day management. They wanted to move away from the limits of a legacy custom platform and utilize Shopify for their digital transformation.
First Glance
Alfred Music has built a long-standing reputation as a leader in educational music publishing, serving educators, students, schools, and musicians around the world. As customer expectations continued to change, the company recognized that its legacy custom ecommerce platform was making it harder to scale, maintain and improve the online buying experience. The business needed a modern commerce foundation that could support both direct-to-consumer and school purchasing workflows. It was also important to reduce technical debt and improve day-to-day operational efficiency. Alfred Music chose to explore a migration to Shopify Plus with Sunrise Integration as its technology partner to create a more flexible digital commerce experience and support future growth.
The Challenge
The main challenge was moving Alfred Music from a legacy custom ecommerce platform to Shopify Plus without losing the business logic and system connections the company depended on. The new platform needed to integrate with Alfred Music’s existing AS/400 order environment and SQL Server database, while also supporting a large order sync process. The project had to support communication between the existing (legacy) systems and the new Shopify storefront.
Another major challenge was digital delivery. Alfred Music needed Shopify to provide customers with secure access to purchased digital sheet music through an online digital library. That meant building a system where each customer could view their own digital purchases and access their files directly through their Shopify account. Customers would receive secure download links tied to watermarked assets stored in the cloud.
The project also had to support Alfred Music’s existing school purchasing process. Supporting the educational community is a big part of Alfred Music's business initiatives, so the new system had to maintain continuity. School need the ability to upload purchase orders with PO numbers that supports a separate approval path within Alfred Music. This introduced more complexity into both the checkout experience and the order management process that are outside Shopify's normal process.
Sunrise Integration was tasked to solve these challenges and build a enterprise solution on Shopify Plus and utilizing Amazon AWS for backend services.
The Solution
Sunrise Integration designed a Shopify Plus and AWS solution that gave Alfred Music a scalable commerce foundation. The scope included migrating the ecommerce site to Shopify Plus, creating a new UX approach, improving product pages, integrating a new digital sheet music process, improving backened services and giving the Alfred Music team easier CMS capabilities for updating the site.
To support backend operations, Sunrise Integration designed a middleware architecture using AWS to manage data synchronization and background processing. The environment uses Shopify APIs and AWS services to move data between Shopify and Alfred Music’s internal systems. Product data is synchronized from SQL Server into Shopify to keep catalog data current. Historical order data was migrated into Shopify to preserve past digital purchases. This allowed customer's digital library to be represented correctly in Shopify.
Sunrise Integration also designed a custom Alfred Admin App that operates as an embedded Shopify service. This app gives Alfred Music’s team more visibility and control over sync activity and support for the digital files. It supports the customer digital library adjustments and school PO approval workflows. This gives Alfred Music a business-specific operational layer inside Shopify that matches the needs of the project. Future features are planned for the Alfred App.
For digital product delivery, Sunrise Integration developed a custom Digital Sheet Music Library in Shopify. This library gives customers a secure place to access purchased digital music assets. The solution includes a watermarking service that dynamically applies watermarks before delivery.
The solution also addressed Alfred Music’s school ordering requirements. During checkout, schools can upload PO files directly into the Shopify checkout. This allows Alfred Music to support both institutional and consumer buying paths within one Shopify environment.
To support launch readiness and long-term usability, the project also included testing, QA, and validation across functional behavior, integrations, data handling, performance, security, accessibility, reliability and usability.
The Outcome
With this Shopify Plus transformation, Alfred Music was able to move away from their costly legacy platform to a new streamlined solution. The new direction gave the business a stronger ecommerce foundation built for flexibility, easier theme management and future expansion. Instead of putting time and budget into maintaining legacy infrastructure, Alfred Music can now support growth and new content more easily.
By combining Shopify Plus, AWS middleware, internal system integrations, digital asset delivery and a custom admin app, the solution was designed to support operational improvements. The result is a digital transformation strategy built to make ecommerce more manageable, more connected and better suited for the way Alfred Music wants to delivers its products.
Sunrise Integration is excited to continue supporting Alfred Music in the future and talks of even more expansion is on the way!
