Case study · Neto → Shopify migration
Bearings Express: off Maropost, onto Shopify, at half the running cost.
58,000+ historical orders, two eBay storefronts, a Bunnings channel, and 30,000+ vehicle-fitment links — moved with 15 minutes of downtime and no measurable dip in sales.
58,000+
historical orders migrated — every customer account, 3,700+ SKUs
~50%
cut in monthly tech spend — $1,917 down to $944 AUD
15 min
total downtime on cutover day
30,000+
vehicle-fitment links carried to eBay, refreshed weekly
The client
Precision is the product.
Bearings Express is a Queensland-based specialist retailer of bearings, V-belts, mower parts and automotive components. Thousands of orders a month move through a catalogue where a belt one inch out of spec is a guaranteed return — accurate sizing and vehicle-fitment data is the difference between a sale and a refund.
The business sells through its own website, two eBay storefronts and Bunnings MarketLink, all fulfilled from one warehouse.
The tipping point
Paying more every year, getting less.
Bearings Express ran on Neto for years, and it did the job. After Maropost acquired the platform, the equation changed: renewal pricing climbed sharply, while — in the team's experience — support that used to answer same-day started taking days.
The question wasn't whether to move — it was whether a move could be done without breaking a business that ships every day and can't pause for a "replatforming project".
Before / after
Same store. New platform.
The full homepage, before and after — the Neto site as it ran on Maropost, and the Shopify rebuild that replaced it.
Full-page captures of each homepage, shown at the same scale. The Shopify page is simply longer — on-site vehicle search, category tiles, and a live product grid replaced the static category links.
Preparation
Measure everything before moving anything.
The discovery was free of charge. Before any commitment, Synckony audited the entire operation as it actually ran on Maropost: the full tech and marketing stack, 32 shipping methods and the logic that chose between them, the complete category tree, marketplace wiring for both eBay accounts and Bunnings — and the data quirks a migration would trip over, including the discovery that over half of the customer records carried eBay relay email addresses that would have poisoned any naive import.
Then the money question, line by line: every subscription, app fee and per-order cost on the old stack, mapped against its equivalent on the proposed Shopify stack — same capability or better on every row.
Monthly running cost, before and after
−$973.68/month · $11,684/year saved| Line item | Neto / Maropost | Shopify |
|---|---|---|
| Platform fee | $569.80 | $135.00 |
| Card transaction fees | $333.01 | $304.18 |
| Email marketing | $166.73 | $27.60 |
| Vehicle fitment app | $221.41 | $20.00 |
| Marketplace connectors | $217.80 | $47.73 |
| Product feeds (Feedops) | $375.00 | $375.00 |
| Shipping app | $0.00 | $26.22 |
| Address validation | $7.95 | $7.95 |
| Social login | $16.67 | $0.00 |
| Hosting | $9.00 | $0.00 |
| Total | $1,917.36 | $943.68 |
All figures AUD per month, from the pre-migration cost audit. Same capability or better on every row.
The build
Everything moved. Several things improved.
Every record, not a sample
All 58,000+ historical orders were imported with their original order numbers and dates, searchable exactly as before. Every customer account came across — with the discovery that over half carried eBay relay email addresses handled properly rather than imported as broken emails. Shipping addresses were backfilled onto more than 50,000 historical orders.
The catalogue, restructured where it deserved it
All 3,700+ SKUs came across. Forty-eight belt families that existed on Neto as flat walls of near-identical listings were rebuilt as proper size-variant products — one page, one size picker, per family.
Shipping logic recreated exactly
Light parcels in prepaid satchels, heavier ones through AusPost eParcel, chosen by product size, weight and postcode — a five-thousand-postcode rule set rebuilt on Shopify, plus automatic warehouse pick-tags on every incoming order.
Marketplaces: reconnected and made better
Both eBay storefronts reconnected with listings intact. More than 30,000 vehicle-compatibility links (eBay ePIDs) and the item-specifics that drive eBay search placement were carried over and refresh automatically every week. The Bunnings MarketLink mapping was rebuilt from scratch after the audit showed the legacy mapping was partly wrong — and the move opened a new channel on Temu.
The website came out ahead
A refreshed design; on-site vehicle search (year / make / model); belt size guides on the product page and inside eBay descriptions, driven from one data source so they can never disagree; bulk-pricing offers next to the price; and interchange part numbers made searchable.
Migration day
Fifteen minutes.
The riskiest moment of any replatforming is DNS cutover. The incumbent DNS host's configuration would have forced a two-to-four-hour propagation blackout, so DNS was moved to Cloudflare ahead of time — making the final switch a staged, pre-verified flip rather than a leap of faith.
Total downtime on the day: 15 minutes. Orders flowed before, and orders flowed after. Sales through cutover week tracked normal — no dip, no recovery period, no "please bear with us" banner.
And the month after was included, not invoiced: a written operations guide, screen-share training, and same-week turnaround on every "how do I…" — while the weekly fitment refresh, marketplace syncs and pick-tag automation run unattended.
Monthly tech spend
$1,917.36
$943.68 — ~50% lower
Historical data
On the old platform
All orders + customers migrated, searchable
eBay fitment
Manually maintained
30,000+ links, auto-refreshed weekly
Vehicle search on site
✗
✓
Marketplaces
Website, eBay ×2, Bunnings
Same, plus Temu
Shipping logic
32 methods, satchel/eParcel split
Recreated exactly, plus automated pick-tags
Support
Days, in the team's experience
A partner on first-name terms
Thinking about leaving Maropost?
Synckony has been on both sides of this migration — deep in Neto's data model and fluent in Shopify. The discovery and cost comparison are free, and you'll know your real before/after numbers before you commit to anything.
Your store could be next.
A free audit, a fixed quote, and a cutover measured in minutes — not days.