15 years of bespoke shipping rules, replatformed to Shopify in 5 days.

Why Time4sleep moved to Shopify. And what they couldn't afford to lose.

Time4sleep had spent 15 years building bespoke shipping logic on custom platforms. First Magento, then a custom PHP build maintained by their development agency. The system handled the realities of selling beds at scale: postcode-based lead times, two different carrier types, in-stock vs out-of-stock logic, dropship suppliers that bypassed the warehouse, Saturday surcharges, midday cut-offs, and 50+ blocked dates each year.

Three reasons to migrate.

Moving to Shopify Plus was a deliberate choice on three fronts.

First, maintainability. A modern, app-extensible foundation. Easier to hire for, easier to train, no individual developer holding the keys to the shipping logic.

Second, predictable cost. Subscription pricing replaces open-ended custom dev hours. No surprise quotes when something needs to change.

Third, checkout performance. The custom platform's checkout was years behind modern Shopify Plus — which matters in a category where mid-decision cart abandonment is the single biggest revenue leak.

One reason it almost didn't happen.

15 years of operational refinement couldn't be lost in the move. Either Shopify apps could match the existing complexity, or the migration would mean rebuilding it all in custom code on the new platform — which would have just recreated the original problem on a different stack.

Why Flare, not another rebuild.

The default move would have been to commission custom development on Shopify — a date picker built specifically for Time4sleep, integrated with the new WMS, configured to their exact rules. That's how the previous platform was built. It's also exactly what they were trying to escape.

Off-the-shelf Shopify apps were the alternative, but most stopped at "block weekends and bank holidays." Time4sleep needed five delivery services with surcharges, postcode-zoned lead times, dropship products that bypassed the calendar, midday cut-offs with weekend rules.

Flare was the only app where the agency could verify on the first scoping call that the existing operational logic could be replicated without writing custom code — and where the checkout had already been battle-tested at scale across hundreds of merchants and thousands of orders before Time4sleep's migration even began.

"This can mirror everything we've got now."

Time4sleep's development is run by Northern Artillery, a UK agency that has worked with the brand for 15+ years across three platforms. Their job during the migration was to assess whether off-the-shelf apps could match what the custom build did. Ben Upex, who leads the Time4sleep account, sat in on the first Flare scoping call.

Live in mid-April 2025. Still running, still upgrading.

Time4sleep went live on Flare in mid-April 2025, two weeks after the project kicked off. In the 12 months since, the system has processed 14,790 orders and over £6 million in GMV — through every peak furniture-buying period, every bank holiday, every warehouse closure.

Custom dev work for the entire migration totalled 5 days. The full annual cost — including Flare's subscription — is £8,171. Northern Artillery hasn't had to maintain shipping logic since launch. New Flare features (postcode rules, capacity caps, customer self-service rescheduling) ship continuously without additional dev work.