One order in six was about to be overcharged postage. Nobody had noticed.
Artistic Signage makes personalised cake toppers, signs and keepsakes in a Melbourne workshop, and needed to get off ageing OpenCart. We rebuilt the store on Shopify end to end — 1,623 customers and the full 234-product catalogue migrated, the theme and branding rebuilt, and product imagery improved with AI enhancement. Then we went looking for what was broken: analysing seven years of order history revealed a shipping setup about to charge double postage on one order in six, which we fixed within the Shopify plan they already had, alongside three checkout defects that were quietly losing orders and a full search rebuild across every product.
- Client
- Artistic Signage
- Industry
- E-commerce — personalised gifts
- Location
- Hillside, Melbourne VIC
- Year
- 2026
- Live site
- artisticsignage.com.au
The rebuilt store
The challenge
A half-finished migration, and problems nobody had reported.
Trading online since 2017, Artistic Signage is a genuine maker — every piece is cut, painted or printed to order. But the move from OpenCart to Shopify had left gaps the business couldn't see. The serious problems weren't in the brief, because nobody knew they existed: a shipping model on track to double-charge postage whenever a customer mixed item sizes in one cart, a checkout that silently blocked pickup and cash payment, 39 products pointing customers at a dead page, a single 66-character setting quietly breaking the title tag on all 312 pages, and the store's most valuable collection page not indexed by Google at all.
What we did
One team. The full stack. In sequence.
- 01Advise
Instead of taking the brief at face value, we analysed the complete legacy order history — 6,984 orders across seven years. It showed 16.4% of all orders mixed shipping sizes and would have been charged double postage, with the store's most common combination (a cake topper bought with a gift) hit hardest. We verified Shopify's plan limits against its own documentation before designing a fix that avoided a $93-a-month upgrade.
- 7-year, 6,984-order history analysis
- Shipping-model diagnosis
- Platform-constraint verification
- 02Build
The core of the engagement: a full rebuild on Shopify. We migrated 1,623 customers from OpenCart — screening out 216 spam records and rejecting 32 injection-attempt rows without catching genuine customers in the sweep — and rebuilt all 234 products, with descriptions rewritten from the client's own knowledge (83 to 207 words on average, zero fabricated specs) and product imagery improved with AI enhancement. We rebuilt the theme, branding, navigation and key pages, rebuilt shipping as a weight-banded profile verified by live checkout testing, fixed the three checkout defects testing had surfaced, repaired every page title with one root-cause fix, and added SEO metadata and structured data across the store.
- Full OpenCart → Shopify rebuild
- 1,623 customers & 234 products migrated
- AI-enhanced product imagery
- Shipping, checkout & SEO rebuilt
- 03Automate
We made the store logic run itself: shipping now computes the correct rate for any cart automatically, a three-tier wholesale programme (5/10/20%) applies B2B pricing without manual quoting, redirects catch every legacy OpenCart URL, and all 234 products carry a working artwork-upload field — where previously only 25 did, on a store where supplying artwork is the whole point.
- Self-correcting cart shipping rates
- Three-tier wholesale programme
- Legacy-URL redirects & upload fields
The results
Found by looking, fixed by testing.
- Customers migrated from OpenCart, with 216 spam records screened out
- 1,623
- Products rebuilt — descriptions rewritten from 83 to 207 words average, imagery AI-enhanced
- 234
- Orders that would have been double-charged postage — found in the 6,984-order analysis, fixed on their existing plan
- 1 in 6
- Postage on the store's most common mixed cart, verified by live checkout testing
- $32.90 → $18.95
Your business is the next one
The constraint holding you back has a fix. Let’s find it.
Thirty minutes on a discovery call. We’ll diagnose where you’re stuck and what the first move should be, whether or not you work with us.