Choosing the Right E-Commerce Partner
to Accelerate Growth

Iristocracy is a fashion retail company devoted to serendipitous eyewear and accessory discoveries, and even more committed to your eye health. The staff at Iristocracy are experts in helping you find the perfect frame based on your personality, face shape-even favorite color. Their cutting edge Virtual Look technology allows customers to be paired with their ultimate eyewear match.

Iristocracy wanted a distinctive, aesthetically-focused online store with easier navigation and a back-end that would help streamline operations. However their chosen platform Magento proved to be a mismatch in too many ways. They had to decide whether to continue investing in a platform that clearly wasn't delivering on its promised value, or re-platform early on in their Direct-to-consumer efforts.

Due to the long list of issues they were having early on, Iristocracy decided to abandon Magento and look for another e-commerce solution. After careful consideration Iristocracy selected Upshot Commerce as their new platform at the end of 2013.

Upshot Commerce delivered the eCommerce Accelerator Solution, which gave Iristocracy a good starting point to get set up and running quickly. Then they focused on customization to suit their brand needs. The focal points in this process were:

The Magento merchandising quirks made it difficult for the team to leverage the technology. For instance when doing merchandising sorting and prioritizing, if a product had to move from 1st to 20-th position one would need to update all the product positions between 2 and 19.

With the Upshot Commerce solution, Iristocracy acquired the ability to influence shoppers with rich data and content in ways that were unimaginable a year or two ago. And with Upshot Commerce's CMS and database field customizer, it was easier to make changes than ever before - no IT person required.

At the time of signing with Upshot Commerce, Iristocracy were going to be featured in the Oprah Magazine in about 6 weeks. They needed a new implementation fast and they needed an implementation that could handle the expected spike in traffic. Upshot Commerce delivered on both counts.

The new site performed exceptionally well and handled all traffic without delays. With the Upshot Commerce industry-beating 99.99% uptime, Iristocracy is virtually guaranteed that when there is a sudden influx of web traffic - their store will be always up and running.

The Magento back end had a lot of usability issues, which often required expert IT advice and additional integrations. With the Upshot Commerce solution, Iristocracy were able to take advantage of a complete set of intuitive tools to run and streamline their business operations. This includes a full-featured OMS, inventory control, customer information management, access to shipping and many more.

The ability to make site updates without the need for IT support was particularly appealing. When Iristocracy wants to switch a picture, or update the layout of a page on their site, they can make a lot of these changes themselves and they have the added benefit of always being one call away from a dedicated project manager, who knows their site and is capable of providing immediate, material help.

With the launch of Iristocracy.com on the Upshot Commerce platform, the team has been able to accomplish their top 3 goals: a distinctive, aesthetically-appealing store with intuitive navigation and a back-end that allows easy changes and smooth and seamless operations. They now have more time to focus on growing their business and enjoy the peace of mind that their e-commerce partners are always there for them.

Upshot Commerce provides a comprehensive platform with robust, enterprise-ready features and best practices for Direct-To-Consumer and B2B e-commerce. Our solutions come standard with tools to control, manage and automate inventory, order management, fulfillment and warehousing, customer information, analytics, SEO, product information, merchandising and faceted navigation, and more. These components come as an integral part of the platform, while with other vendors, they often are through third party providers and with extra cost and headaches. Our platform also integrates exceptionally well with ERPs and 3PLs and contains a rich Restful API to provide a seamless, automated workflow for your enterprise.

Upshot Commerce has been in business for 20 years, with hundreds of clients, millions of transactions per month, over a billion in sales processed. A key aspect that sets us apart is how we approach each customer as a partner. The results speak for themselves: When the average online retailer changes platforms every 4 years, our average customer has been with us 7 and a half years and some as long as 18.