Migration from Lightspeed to Shopify In 2023, The Alpha Men migrated from Lightspeed to Shopify. In the years leading up to the migration, the company had already invested heavily in improving its organic search visibility and had built up a large product lineup. However, it was time for The Alpha Men brand to take the next step. When switching to Shopify, the company also took the opportunity to develop a completely new corporate identity, which involved a rebranding of the brand. In addition, the product lineup was revised, and a custom Shopify theme was created. All of these changes are important for the continued growth of The Alpha Men brand and its ability to stand out from competitors. However, this did make the migration somewhat more complex, requiring the entire process to be carried out with great precision. All redirects were set up by The Alpha Men team, with our team providing guidance, input, and oversight.
Changes to the Product Lineup Based on sales, margins, and The Alpha Men’s focus, the product lineup has expanded and then been streamlined over the past few years. The company has chosen to work exclusively with the best brands, which has resulted in several brands being removed from the product lineup. This included brands that had good visibility through SEO and were generating conversions.
Strong brand identity and a focus on branding While The Alpha Men’s focus with the Lightspeed platform was primarily on growing and driving traffic, the rebranding has shifted that focus to projecting a clear brand identity. A strong brand identity is the foundation of a sustainable brand and ensures that you can build a loyal customer base. However, this has meant that some action items that are interesting from an SEO perspective have not been implemented. The optimizations we’re working on must align well with the brand and add value in terms of search visibility. Sometimes this involves a process of exploration and discussion, but ultimately, the brand must never be compromised.
Technical complexities The Alpha Men’s online store is not a standard Shopify setup. The entire online store is built on Shopify Plus, featuring a custom theme and various bespoke scripts. This presented a number of challenges related to multilingual support (including hreflang tag implementation), meeting Core Web Vitals standards, and the online store’s crawlability. These issues were resolved in collaboration with The Alpha Men’s team.
Issues with conversion tracking Given the setup of Shopify Plus, implementing Google Analytics 4 was also a major challenge. The majority of revenue was attributed to the “Unassigned” channel. As a result, we were unable to analyze revenue by landing page and had to rely on our other data sources, such as the tracking project, Google Search Console, and search terms that converted via Google Ads. The tracking issues have since been resolved, and we are now using Triple Whale’s tracking software.
Growing in the German Market One of the biggest growth opportunities for The Alpha Men is SEO in Germany. The German market offers significant growth potential with an interesting male target audience that values personal care. That’s why the website thealphamen.de has already been set up in Lightspeed. This store has also been migrated to Shopify and needs to be further optimized. The biggest challenge here is broadening the focus: in the Netherlands, we need to continue building our market position, but at the same time, the goal is to achieve growth in Germany as well. To this end, The Alpha Men’s native German colleague is working together with the native German colleagues on our team.