A multi-store art retailer keeps selling when the doors close

The Challenge

A large catalog, several stores and an aging platform

Plaza Art sells art supplies and picture framing from several stores and online, with a very large catalog and gift cards that have to work in both places.

The website ran on a platform generation at the end of its life, and the link that sends web orders to the stores had to survive any replacement.

Then 2020 closed the doors. Curbside and in-store pickup went from a convenience to the way the business kept trading — and pickup had to work at checkout and reconcile in the back office.

The Strategy

Replatform around the store connection, then make pickup dependable

PeakBeyond scoped the replatform around what the business could not lose: the catalog, the gift cards and the connection that routes web orders to the stores. Theme, import tooling, search and payment gateway were chosen against that constraint.

The store connection was important enough to change supplier for, so a new integration partner was brought in rather than making do.

When pickup became critical, we treated it as an operational problem, not a checkout setting: ship-from logic, pickup filters, gift card handling, and self-service steps so the team could fix indexing themselves instead of waiting.

The Solution

Replatform, pickup, then a faster storefront

PeakBeyond has led the technical work continuously since the replatform, scoping each stage around what the business could not lose.

• Replatformed around the store connection — Theme, import tooling, data migration, performance, search, a new integration partner and a payment gateway recommendation, with the catalog, gift cards and store order routing intact.
• Made pickup dependable — Curbside and in-store pickup end to end, with pickup filters, ship-from logic, gift card handling and self-service reindex steps so the team can fix things itself.
• Delivered a faster storefront — The platform upgrade and a new front end with grouped parent and child product pages, new navigation and consolidated redirects.
• Tuned the buying experience — Redesigned cart and checkout with an expanded order summary, quantity controls, a tighter mini-cart and accessible colors, and third-party scripts deferred until interaction.
• Opened marketplace fulfillment and closed the gaps — Direct marketplace fulfillment with shipping data written back to the back office, ship-by dates on pick tickets and a separate marketplace inventory feed, plus cookie consent, locked-down email sending and a duplicate gift card fault traced to caching.

Pickup was treated as an operational problem rather than a checkout setting, which is why it held up in the season a multi-store retailer needed it most.

The Results

Pickup that holds up, and a storefront that keeps pace

The replatform went live with the store connection intact, and digital wallet payments followed in 2020.

The pickup integration was running reliably by December 2020 — the season when a multi-store retailer most needed it — with the team able to resolve indexing themselves.

The new storefront went live in February 2025, followed by cart and checkout improvements and marketplace fulfillment work that keeps inventory and ship-by dates accurate.

Plaza Art can sell from a store, a curb or a marketplace and see it all in one place.