DLC Labs
DLC Labs Modernizes Its E-commerce Foundation With a Shopify Migration
DLC Labs Modernizes Its E-commerce Foundation With a Shopify Migration
First Glance
DLC Labs is a California-based health and personal care brand offering over-the-counter products across categories such as moisturizers, acne treatments, essential oils, first aid, dietary supplements, eye and ear care, cold and allergy products, digestive health and more.
As the business continued to grow, DLC Labs recognized that its existing WooCommerce storefront no longer matched the needs of a modern e-commerce operation. The site reflected an established company, but the platform had become difficult to manage, slow to update and limited in its ability to support a cleaner shopping experience.
DLC Labs turned to Sunrise Integration to perform a technical discovery and define the roadmap for migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify. The goal was to modernize the customer experience, simplify internal site management, improve product organization and prepare the brand for future growth.
The Challenge
The existing DLC Labs WooCommerce site had become heavily customized, which made everyday product management time-consuming and inconsistent for the internal team.
Creating and updating products required too many manual steps. Product listings needed custom fields for ingredients, warnings, how-to-use instructions, drug facts, supplement facts, expiration dates, UPCs, item codes and hazmat-related details. Pricing updates were also difficult because the team had to manage attributes and variations through a clumsy workflow.
The product catalog created additional complexity. DLC Labs wanted to preserve product variations instead of splitting items into separate listings, while still supporting unique sizes, pricing, barcodes and product-specific data. The team also needed better templates for OTC products, cosmetics and dietary supplements.
The customer experience had its own limitations. The site needed a more modern design, better navigation, improved product discovery, Spanish language support, wishlists, subscriptions, reviews, clearer shipping logic and a more reliable store locator.
The migration also required careful planning around operational needs. DLC Labs needed three years of historical customer and order data moved into Shopify, live carrier rate calculations, contiguous U.S. and territory shipping restrictions, hazmat cart flagging, Klaviyo integration, GA4 setup and support for future marketplace expansion through Amazon, Walmart and eBay.
The Solution
Sunrise Integration performed a full technology discovery to review DLC Labs’ current WooCommerce environment, document business requirements and define the future-state Shopify architecture.
The recommended path was to migrate DLC Labs to Shopify, giving the company a scalable platform that could support a cleaner storefront, stronger site management tools and future growth.
Sunrise Integration mapped the project around several key workstreams:
Shopify migration and data planning
Sunrise Integration defined a migration plan for products, customers and three years of order history. The plan accounted for Shopify’s stricter validation rules and included a process for skipped records so DLC Labs would receive a clear exception file showing any records that could not be imported. Sunrise Integration used their custom Sunrise Databurst AI tool to ensure data cleanup and enrichment were sustained within the new site.
Product information architecture
Sunrise Integration recommended using Shopify metafields to preserve and structure the custom product data that DLC Labs relied on in WooCommerce. This included ingredients, warnings, how-to-use content, hazmat flags, product facts, custom product details and other extended product fields.
Modern theme and CMS strategy
The Sunrise Integration design team created a new, modern design for the DLC Labs storefront. The new Shopify site would use native Shopify theme tools and reusable content sections so the DLC Labs team could manage pages, promotions and product content without depending on custom development for every update.
Spanish translation support
The future Shopify store would support Spanish content through Shopify’s native translation tools, allowing DLC Labs to continue maintaining translated product and site content through a more structured workflow.
Store locator modernization
Because DLC Labs needed to show retail locations based on distributor-provided Excel or CSV data, Sunrise Integration recommended a Shopify store locator app that would allow the team to upload and manage location data more efficiently.
Wholesale inquiry support
Sunrise Integration recommended using Shopify Forms to capture wholesale inquiries through a simple native workflow that could send submissions to the DLC Labs team without adding unnecessary custom complexity.
The Outcome
Sunrise Integration helped DLC Labs rethink how the storefront, product catalog, customer experience and internal workflows should operate. The result was a practical modernization plan designed to reduce manual effort, improve content control and make the site easier to manage over time via Shopify. The discovery turned a complex migration into a structured plan with defined requirements, known risks, recommended tools and a phased path toward a more modern e-commerce experience.
For the DLC Labs team, the Shopify migration roadmap created a cleaner operational model. Product data could be organized through metafields, variations could be managed more consistently and future content updates could happen through Shopify’s native CMS tools instead of a heavily customized WooCommerce backend.
The project positioned DLC Labs for long-term growth. With Shopify as the new e-commerce foundation, DLC Labs would be better prepared to support future marketplace expansion, marketing automation, improved analytics, scalable shipping workflows and ongoing site optimization.
