The setup
A specialty coffee brand doing roughly $4M GMV/year on Shopify Advanced. Mix is ~60% DTC, ~40% wholesale: 38 cafes, roasters, and offices on different pricing tiers. Subscribers on Recharge, growing.
The stack on day zero of the migration:
- Bold Custom Pricing for wholesale tiers ($79/mo)
- Shopify Scripts for stacking subscriber discount on top of wholesale
- A wholesale-signup app for new stockist onboarding ($25/mo)
- A spreadsheet the founder maintained to track which stockist was on which tier
Total: $104/mo in apps, plus a half-day every two weeks for the founder to reconcile the spreadsheet against Shopify customer tags.
The trigger
Two things, in sequence:
- Bold's renewal email reminded the founder that Bold was migrating off Scripts — they'd need to redo their subscriber-discount logic.
- A wholesale customer emailed: "I just placed an order at retail price. What happened?" The customer had been re-tagged during a Shopify customer cleanup six weeks earlier. Nobody noticed because there was no audit log.
The founder spent a weekend evaluating alternatives. TagTier won on three things: no Shopify Scripts dependency (so the June 2026 deadline was a non-event), audit log + rollback (so the re-tagging incident wouldn't recur silently), and a single subscription that replaced both Bold and the spreadsheet logic.
The migration
Total elapsed time: 9 days, ~14 hours of work spread out.
- Day 1 (2 hours): Installed TagTier on a development store. Imported the Bold tier matrix as TagTier rules. Tested two scenarios manually.
- Day 2–3 (3 hours): Configured Recharge tag automation so subscribers get tagged on activation. Verified subscriber price-lock at signup vs. renewal on a sandbox subscription.
- Day 4 (1 hour): Wrote a customer email explaining "no change to your pricing, no action needed" — standard migration courtesy.
- Day 5–7 (parallel run): Production: TagTier and Bold running side-by-side. Watched 22 wholesale orders flow through. All matched expected prices. Caught one rule-priority bug (a customer with both
wholesale-bandvip-tier-1matched the wrong rule first — reordered the rules). - Day 8 (30 min): Disabled the Bold rules. TagTier sole pricing source.
- Day 9 (8 hours): Uninstalled Bold, killed the spreadsheet, archived the Scripts. Wrote internal SOP doc.
Outcomes (90 days post-migration)
- App spend: $104/mo → $29/mo. $900/year saved.
- Spreadsheet reconciliation time: 1 hour/week → 0. The founder estimates ~25 hours/quarter back.
- Wholesale-pricing customer-support tickets: 4 in the 90 days before migration → 0 in the 90 days after.
- Subscriber renewal price-mismatch refunds: 2–3/month before → 0 after.
- Time to roll out a new wholesale tier: "It used to take a Saturday. Now it's 10 minutes between coffee orders."
What didn't change
No customer-facing communication was needed beyond the pre-migration email. Wholesale customers logged in and saw the same prices they always had. Subscribers continued renewing without intervention. The brand's PDP, theme, and checkout flow were untouched.
The one feature they kept from the old stack
The wholesale-signup app, at $25/mo. TagTier doesn't ship a signup form (that lives elsewhere by design), and the existing app worked fine. Net stack: TagTier ($29) + signup app ($25) = $54/mo, vs. the original $104/mo.
Quote
"The audit log is what made me trust it. With Bold and the spreadsheet, every wholesale-pricing change felt like a small risk. With TagTier I can change a tier and roll it back in 10 seconds if I misjudged. That's it. That's the whole feeling."
Related on TagTier
- Shopify wholesale without Plus: the 2026 playbook
- Pricing tier governance: rollback, audit, version control
- All case studies
Want to be a case study?
If you've migrated to TagTier or are running it in an interesting setup, we write up the story; you approve every word. Email hello@tagtier.com with "case study" in the subject.