Peter Tivy has dedicated over half his lifetime to the commerce space. As founder and CEO of Teifi, he’s led the digital commerce agency in helping migrate businesses onto the Shopify platform—particularly those striving for unified commerce—since 2015.
Teifi used to work with multiple commerce platforms, but they’ve since gone all-in on Shopify. “Shopify was consistently the platform of choice through our evaluations,” says Peter. “And because of that, we really wanted to be the best in the world at one particular thing. And so we decided to focus all our resources on Shopify.”
While Teifi works with brands across retail, food and beverage, franchise, and furniture, they’re a major player in the automotive and motorcycle industries. Because Shopify’s platform is scalable and has so many features baked in, Teifi has solved many brands’ challenges natively. For anything industry-specific, the agency has used Shopify’s extensibility to build apps to fit those needs. “Shopify as a platform makes all the important stuff super easy,” says Peter. “It basically allows us to do anything.”
As a Shopify partner, Teifi has experienced benefits such as:
- 100% annual growth each year
- Seven-figure cost savings for Car Toys, an automotive accessory retailer
- Launched an expansion store with Shopify in just 2 weeks for a brand looking to grow globally
Read on to learn more, or watch the full interview here.
The challenge: Trade in technical debt for a unified platform
Most of the brands Teifi works with are legacy businesses. They've been around for 20, 30, sometimes even 100 years—and in that time, many have accumulated plenty of technical debt.
“The [brands] that we end up talking to either have some sort of complex integration, whether it be to an ERP or to a homegrown tech stack, or they’re coming out of [another platform] like Adobe or BigCommerce, and there was a lot of tech debt and a lot of cost attached to their platform,” says Peter. “They want something that has more out-of-the-box capabilities like Shopify.”
Many are looking to provide experiences similar to that of direct consumers to their B2B business. While traditional forms of selling—like personal selling through distributors—may have worked in the past, buyers are now shifting their behaviors and expectations toward modern, self-serve experiences.
Others are trying to unify their brick-and-mortar locations with their online platform. Without that connection, it’s difficult to understand store traffic and whether their digital marketing is actually working.
There’s also complexity with back-end operations and supply chain processing. Events like special orders and back-ordered products are difficult to tie back to their enterprise resource planning (ERP), so many brands are looking for a point of sale solution to simplify operations for retail staff and store managers.
This is where Teifi and Shopify kick into high gear.
“Businesses are really trying to just shed the technical debt, and the way Shopify is designed and the way they built the product is—with B2B, retail, marketplaces—it's just built on top of the core DTC platform, and it truly is a unified commerce or commerce platform. Because of that, we're super passionate about this concept of a digital transformation onto Shopify.”
—Peter Tivy, Founder and CEO, Teifi
The solution: Build apps to fast track auto experiences
Shopify’s extensibility has been core to the success of both Teifi and the brands they work with. On the front end, Teifi has built React-based applications using Shopify components. On the back end, they use Shopify’s APIs and data extensibility to extend the core functionality by building apps like the Teifi Parts Accelerator.
“We're able to put pieces of IP [intellectual property] together that solve specific problems for Shopify and put that together into a nice little package,” says Peter. “What we see with these accelerators is there's a lot of repeatability and a lot of applications of these to different merchants. So we've actually gone ahead and productized some of these and put them into the Shopify ecosystem.”
The app for automotive brands allows parts fitment—the system that makes sure modification products will fit on a shopper’s car—to work with Shopify. Teifi has integrated it when migrating brands with hundreds of thousands, even millions, of SKUs. They’ve worked with manufacturers, original equipment manufacturers, resellers, and distribution companies. And in doing so, they’ve been able to repeatedly use the out-of-the-box capabilities of Shopify, while seamlessly bringing in each business’s fitment and parts information natively into the platform.
Build omnichannel experiences fit for the enthusiasts
When Car Toys migrated from Magento (now Adobe Commerce) to Shopify, they took advantage of another of Teifi’s apps, Workmate. The legacy car accessories brand had been around for 38 years, and, as Peter says, “They'd never had a successful IT project.”
Teifi helped them migrate to Shopify in 30 days, after which they got to work launching Shopify POS across their 47 stores. They used Workmate to bring their brick-and-mortar experiences online by opening a buy-online, pick-up-in-store (BOPIS) experience that they extended to support installation. “If somebody buys online, they can book an installation at one of their stores all natively through Shopify checkout and then manage directly in Shopify POS,” says Peter.
As a result of the migration, Car Toys saved almost seven figures in the first year. They've since restructured the company toward this new digital strategy, setting themselves up for additional cost savings in the long term.
The results: Grow your agency by tackling new roads ahead
Teifi has kept their Shopify strategy simple from the start: “We really focused our strategy on going after these new markets for Shopify…how we did a full transformation onto the platform, how we solved these complex problems with Shopify, and how we made things just easier for [brands].”
In their first year as a partner, Teifi helped bring 25 brands onto Shopify. Since then, they’ve been constantly looking for new areas of commerce growth to capitalize on—and as a result, they’ve become a Platinum Shopify partner.
“Shopify has invested so much in the core product. It's really opened up the total addressable market for partners like Teifi to really go after.”
—Peter Tivy, Founder and CEO, Teifi
This includes working with some of their brands in North America as they expand into APAC and EMEA. On Shopify, they launched one brand into the UK market by standing up an expansion store with Shopify in just two weeks.
They also help brands lower acquisition costs—across online and in store. As Peter describes it, “It's allowing us to identify customers that are coming into our [brands’] brick and mortar, whether it be 50, 100, a thousand locations. If we're able to identify just 10% more of our customers coming into brick and mortar, that customer acquisition cost is incredibly invaluable.”
All of this has accumulated in massive growth for Teifi as well. In the last two years, they've had 100% growth every year—and they're tracking for another 100% growth next year as well.
As for what the future holds, Peter has big plans: “We want to be the biggest, baddest agency systems integrator in Shopify—in unified commerce—that's really our goal is to be the leader in that space.” They’re already well on their way.
Watch the entire interview
Watch the full interview with Peter Tivy, founder and CEO of the digital commerce agency Teifi, about their work with brands in the automotive industry.
