Improving Functionality Through an eCommerce Platform Migration

In need of improved store functionality and an enhanced design, Bob Ross required the sure hand and expertise of a veteran eCommerce development agency to help them migrate to a more advanced platform.

When a recognisable brand outgrows its platform

The Bob Ross store sells art supplies and licensed products tied to one of the most recognisable creative brands in the world — a catalogue whose presentation carries real brand weight. The business needed two things at once that a platform migration tends to force together: functionality the existing platform could not deliver, and a design befitting the brand. Volusion had become the limiting factor on both. Migrating to a more capable platform was therefore not an IT exercise but the precondition for the design and functionality the brand required.

An engagement of this kind has to protect a well-known brand's catalogue and customer-facing structure through a platform change while simultaneously delivering the improvements that justified the move. The migration and the redesign are coupled deliverables, not sequential ones.

1Digital^® not only performed a full platform and data migration for Bob Ross, helping them transition their store from Volusion to BigCommerce Enterprise, an array of other important design and development tasks were performed as well, which included the implementation of a brand new mega menu and retaining the functionality of their custom category pages.

How a Volusion-to-BigCommerce migration with redesign works

When 1Digital moves a brand from Volusion onto BigCommerce Enterprise, the migration and the development run together so that nothing the brand relies on is lost in transit. The full catalogue, customer, and order data is exported and re-mapped onto BigCommerce; in parallel, the custom category pages that are part of how this store presents its products are deliberately preserved rather than flattened into stock templates — for a brand-heavy catalogue, those custom pages are an asset, not incidental markup.

The new mega menu is representative of the development that accompanies a migration of this kind: a navigation rebuild that takes advantage of the more capable platform to make a large branded catalogue easier to move through. Coupling the migration with the design and development work is the point — the platform change is what unlocks the improved functionality and design the brief required, and a project like this targets a store that arrives on BigCommerce both intact and better than it left Volusion.

Why a recognisable brand makes the coupling non-negotiable

The Bob Ross store carries one of the most recognisable creative brands in the world, and that raises the stakes of the migration's coupling. The custom category pages are not incidental markup; they are part of how a brand-heavy art-supplies catalogue presents itself, and flattening them into stock templates during a replatform would have been a brand regression disguised as a technical task. So preserving them through the move to BigCommerce Enterprise is treated as a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have.

The new mega menu is the other side of the same coin: the migration is the chance to take advantage of a more capable platform to make a large branded catalogue easier to navigate, not merely to reproduce what Volusion allowed. The honest claim for an engagement like this is structural rather than numeric — the store arrived on BigCommerce with its data, its brand-critical custom pages, and its catalogue intact, and with the design and functionality improvements that justified leaving Volusion in the first place actually delivered.

The risk-management framing is the honest one for a migration of a brand this recognisable. The danger in any replatform is not that the data fails to copy but that something the brand quietly depended on — its custom category presentation, its navigation, the structure customers were used to — is lost in translation and only noticed afterward. Treating the custom category pages as a requirement to preserve, and rebuilding the navigation deliberately rather than approximating it, is what makes the move to BigCommerce Enterprise an upgrade rather than a gamble. For a catalogue carrying the weight of the Bob Ross brand, that protection is the substance of the engagement, described structurally and without invented figures.