How B&W Trailer Hitches Streamlined Sales By Migrating to Shopify

+ 136 %

faster loading times on GTMetrix

+ 120 %

Higher Revenue

- 80 %

Maintenance Costs

TL;DR

What We Shipped

B&W Trailer Hitches was running on a legacy Drupal site that was expensive to maintain and hard to scale, with an earlier Shopify setup limited to Buy Buttons behind a password-protected storefront. Fyresite migrated them to Shopify Plus with a native cart and checkout, rebuilt their dealer and product-finder tools, and mapped their structured data into Shopify metaobjects. The new store loads 136% faster on GTMetrix, drove 120% higher revenue, and cut maintenance costs by 80%.

Migrated to Shopify Plus

Moved off Drupal onto a native cart and checkout, replacing the old Buy Button storefront.

Find Your Hitch (Y/M/M)

A Year/Make/Model fitment tool built on Shopify metaobjects for fast, accurate matching.

Nationwide dealer locator

Geo-targeted search across roughly 36,000 dealers with distance-based filtering.

MVP dealer program

Dealer application, approval workflow, and automated data sync for the Maximum Value Program.

Modern checkout

Line-item properties, financing, cross-sells, and Avalara tax on Shopify Plus.

Structured data migration

Drupal content and product attributes mapped into Shopify metafields and metaobjects.

American Made Trailer Hitch Manufacturer Conslidates Their eCommerce Infrastructure With Fyresite

Industry

Automotive
Manufacturing

Services

Drupal to Shopify Migration
Y/M/M Vehicle Fitment

The Problem

B&W Trailer Hitches faced growing complexity across both technology and user experience.

Their legacy Drupal site required significant maintenance, limited merchandising agility, and made it difficult to scale structured product data such as year/make/model compatibility.

Also, their earlier Shopify integration relied on Buy Buttons and...

B&W Trailer Hitches faced growing complexity across both technology and user experience.

Their legacy Drupal site required significant maintenance, limited merchandising agility, and made it difficult to scale structured product data such as year/make/model compatibility.

Also, their earlier Shopify integration relied on Buy Buttons and password‑protected storefront access, which created friction in checkout flows and abandoned cart recovery.

Beyond checkout, they needed a store to support a robust dealer ecosystem, improve product discovery tools, modernize content marketing, and prepare their site for evolving SEO and AI/LLM discovery standards.

The challenge? To migrate completely and quickly, without a full redesign or prolonged downtime.

The Solution

Our team went right to work, architecting a Shopify Plus migration designed for speed, scalability, and long‑term flexibility.

The engagement began with discovery and information architecture, mapping Drupal’s content and data structures to Shopify’s metafields & metaobjects. This is done to support advanced product attributes,...

Our team went right to work, architecting a Shopify Plus migration designed for speed, scalability, and long‑term flexibility.

We carefully preserved B&W Trailer Hitches’ existing visual language while resolving critical UX gaps.

Next, our team replaced Buy Button carts with a native Shopify cart + checkout, added support for line‑item properties, financing options, cross‑sells, and Plus‑grade tax integrations, and ensured checkout extensibility.

Finally, dealer functionality was modernized through structured Dealer Resources, MVP program workflows, dealer verification, and an enhanced dealer locator powered by daily data ingest. Product discovery was strengthened with scalable Y/M/M tooling built on Shopify metaobjects, enabling performant filtering and matching.

Custom Features

What we engineered

Dealer Locator Proxy App

A custom AWS serverless app manages roughly 36,000 dealer records, serving geo-targeted, distance-based search (nearest 30 within an adjustable radius) from a SQL store synced daily.

Dealer Data API

A full REST API handles batch and single dealer upserts and deletes, with idempotency keys, phone and address normalization, published-versus-unpublished visibility, and cron-driven bulk updates every four hours.

Find Your Hitch (Y/M/M)

Year/Make/Model interchange data moved into Shopify metaobjects and metafields with indexes, enabling performant fitment matching without an external lookup on every query.

MVP Program Workflow

Dealer applications flow through an iPaaS pipeline to an approval step, then approved records post as JSON payloads into the proxy app and reconcile against Plex ERP.

Plex ERP Integration

Middleware brokers dealer and product data between Shopify and Plex in both directions, with four-hour replication keeping records current.

Native Checkout Rebuild

Buy Buttons replaced with a native Shopify cart and checkout, adding line-item properties, Shop Pay Installments and Affirm financing, cross-sells, and Avalara tax.