A very large outdoor catalog gets a faster storefront without changing platforms

The Challenge

A slow site on a catalog too big to start over with

Frank's sells fishing, hunting and outdoor gear from a Michigan store, its website and the marketplaces, with everything tied back to one retail system.

The storefront had become slow and dated, and the platform itself was overdue for an upgrade. Replacing the platform outright would have meant rebuilding a very large catalog, its integrations and its search rankings from scratch.

Meanwhile the day-to-day was leaking: marketplace orders stuck before reaching the retail system, renumbered items breaking imports, thousands of items wrongly flagged discontinued online, and back-ordered kits that didn't hold stock.

The Strategy

Decide with evidence, then rebuild the front, not the foundation

Frank's weighed moving to a hosted platform with lower maintenance against staying put and rebuilding the storefront for speed. PeakBeyond ran that comparison properly — demos, a trial store, development estimates for both routes, and a review of what each would cost in extensions and shipping logic.

The evidence favored keeping the platform and replacing the front end, which protected the catalog, the integrations and the search rankings while still delivering the speed the business wanted.

We paired that with an operational clean-up, on the principle that a faster storefront is worth little if orders still stall on their way to the retail system.

The Solution

A new storefront, new hosting and cleaner operations

PeakBeyond led the program with the development, hosting, search and integration partners, and sequenced it so the catalog and the rankings were never at risk.

• Decided with evidence — Ran the comparison between moving platforms and rebuilding the storefront, then led weekly design reviews for product, category and mobile pages before the build was approved.
• Replaced the storefront, not the foundation — Platform upgrade, theme build, menu redesign, hosting move, integration compatibility, the launch runbook and the cutover.
• Hardened the store — Root-cause analysis of the checkout order failures delivered to the provider, then firewall rules, security patches and category and URL clean-up.
• Rebuilt how customers find products — Replaced site search and merchandising, repopulated the empty brand pages, and ran a technical search and accessibility program.
• Opened new channels and fixed the order pipeline — A social commerce channel, corrected marketplace pricing and category mapping, dropshipping with blocks for restricted products, and import retries, stock commitments, bulk catalog corrections and inventory sync to the shipping system.

Keeping the platform meant each change could be proved on the store the business already had, and the new storefront launched on schedule with its rankings intact.

The Results

Launched on schedule, with the catalog and rankings intact

The new storefront launched on October 15, 2025, on the existing platform, so the catalog, integrations and search rankings carried over rather than being rebuilt.

More than 8,000 items that had been wrongly flagged as discontinued were corrected in bulk, brand pages were fully populated again after the search fix, and marketplace orders now route into the retail system instead of stalling.

Since launch the focus has moved to growth: new marketplace and social channels, dropshipping, and a technical search and accessibility program including accessible sale pricing for screen readers.

Frank's got the speed of a rebuild without paying the price of starting over.