15 disconnected Shopify instances were running one retail business. Then we fixed it.
Ringers Western · Western and Country Apparel · 15 stores across Australia
15 → 1
Shopify instances consolidated
38.4%
Repeat purchase rate
(up from 26.1%)
+6.6%
Average order value
($112 to $119)
$120k+
Gift cards issued 78% already redeemed
The problem
Ringers Western were one of the earliest Australian retailers to adopt Shopify POS. When they opened their first store, Shopify did not yet support multiple physical locations under a single instance. So, they did what made sense at the time: they set up each new store as its own standalone Shopify site.
It worked, until it did not. By the time the business had grown to 15 stores across Australia, the stack had become fragmented and almost unmanageable. Fifteen individual Shopify instances meant fifteen separate back ends, fifteen sets of product data, fifteen maintenance cycles, and no way to see the business as a whole. Every store was its own island.
The operational cost was real and daily. A customer who bought something at one store could not return it at another. There was no shared order history. Gift cards were locked to the store where they were purchased. Loyalty was impossible to run at all. Click-and-collect and online-to-store purchases required manual intervention, with store staff calling head office to check stock, reconcile orders, or verify a customer's history. The online store sat on a separate platform entirely, adding another layer to an already fragmented picture.
And underneath all of it, Ringers Western could not see their own business. Every metric -- revenue, customer behaviour, transaction volume -- was split across 15 separate back ends with no consolidated view. Running the business meant piecing together data from 15 different sources just to understand what was happening across the network.
"When I saw what they'd built across 15 separate instances, I was taken aback. The internal team had done an incredible job making it work for as long as they did. But consolidating into a single instance was the obvious next move."
Aaron Chidley, Make Retail
What we did
Make Retail came to the project through Convert Digital, who had won the brief to modernise Ringers Western's online store. Consolidating the point-of-sale stack was a natural and necessary part of that work.
The job was to understand exactly what the existing 15-instance setup was doing. How each store was configured. What product and customer data lived where. Then migrate everything into a single, consolidated Shopify instance, including product catalogues, staff credentials, and access controls across every store.
Systems integration was part of the scope, supporting the data flows the business relied on across retail and operations. Training documentation was developed so store teams could move confidently into Shopify POS, now running all 15 stores under a single instance.
The go-live strategy was designed to keep stores trading without interruption. In practice, staff logged out of their standalone site and into the consolidated instance. Simple in execution, but only possible because the underlying migration had been done carefully. Staff credentials, access levels, and store-specific configurations carried across cleanly.
Tech implementations fail when people don't trust the new system. Training isn't a box to tick. It's the difference between a rollout that works and one that gets quietly abandoned.
What changed
The clearest measure of what consolidation unlocked is what customers started doing.
Repeat purchase rate climbed from 26.1% to 38.4% -- a 12.3 percentage point increase year on year. That is not a marginal shift. It reflects something structural: for the first time, Ringers Western could identify a single customer across every store in the network. A person who bought in Brisbane and returned in Perth was now the same customer in the system. Building a relationship with that customer, and acting on it, became possible in a way it simply was not before.
Average order value rose 6.6% over the same period, from $112.11 to $119.49. One product catalogue. One set of pricing. One system for the team to manage and the customer to experience consistently, wherever they shop.
Gift cards tell their own story. Since consolidation, $120,883 in gift cards has been issued, with 78% already redeemed. That capability did not exist before. Gift cards were locked to the store where they were purchased, which made them a practical dead end for anyone who shopped across the network. Now they work everywhere.
Ringers Western can also see their business for the first time. Revenue, transactions, and customer behaviour across all 15 stores in a single view. That visibility changes how the team makes decisions -- what to stock, where to focus, which stores are performing and why.
The overhead of maintaining 15 separate back ends is gone. The time staff previously spent working around disconnected systems is time they can now spend with customers.
And the platform is built to grow. Adding a new store no longer means standing up a new Shopify instance from scratch. It means adding a location to a system that already works. For a brand with ambitions to keep expanding, that matters.
Running a fragmented tech stack?
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hello@makeretail.com.au
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1300 844 599
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