Seamless Ecommerce Subscription Platform Transition for Death Wish Coffee
Death Wish Coffee's subscription platform was bleeding money and subscribers — 2,000 frontend errors, 50% drop-off mid-funnel, and a previous vendor that walked away post-launch. We migrated tens of thousands of subscribers to OrderGroove on Shopify Plus with zero data loss, and fixed every issue in the queue.
Live since 2023
A subscription business leaking revenue through 2,000 broken doors.
Death Wish Coffee runs one of the most recognized direct-to-consumer subscription businesses in coffee — a steady, predictable engine that funds the rest of the company. By 2021, that engine was sputtering. The previous agency had built a subscription portal that didn’t work, then dismantled the team after launch. The Death Wish Coffee team inherited a system riddled with bugs and no one to fix them.
The numbers told the story. Roughly 2,000 frontend issues sat open in the queue. Around 50% of new subscriber attempts dropped off mid-funnel. The portal’s look and feel had drifted away from the brand the marketing team had spent years building. Customer service was absorbing the cost of every broken touchpoint.
The brief, when Commence was brought in, was bigger than a refresh. Audit everything, migrate the platform without losing a single recurring customer, fix the 2,000 errors, and rebuild the customer portal so it looked and felt like Death Wish Coffee — not like the agency that built it.
Diagnose everything, migrate without disruption, then optimize what matters.
A full-site audit before any code shipped.
Started with a comprehensive audit using Quantum Metrics — SEO rankings, competitor performance, conversion drop-off mapping, and friction-point analysis. The audit set baseline benchmarks for every subsequent optimization and informed the migration sequencing. Nothing got changed until we knew what it was costing the business.
OrderGroove migration with zero data loss.
Migrated tens of thousands of active subscribers from the legacy platform to OrderGroove on Shopify Plus. Built a dual-write soak harness so we could validate every customer record before cutover. No subscriber dropped, no recurring payment skipped, and most customers never noticed the swap had happened.
2,000 frontend errors → 18 after launch.
Worked through every issue in the inherited queue. Triaged by revenue impact, fixed in priority order, and ran regression on the entire flow before re-shipping. By post-launch QA, the original 2,000-issue backlog was down to 18 minor cosmetic items — a 99% reduction.
A customer portal that looks like Death Wish Coffee.
Redesigned the subscription portal to match the brand system marketing had been building everywhere else. Subscribers can now pause, swap, skip, change frequency, and update payment without leaving the brand experience or filing a ticket. The portal feels like the rest of the site instead of an off-brand utility tool.
A CRO sprint that compounds month over month.
Post-migration, we layered in a continuous optimization program: PDP variant testing, cart-level subscription upsell, lifecycle email tightening, and quarterly reporting against the original audit benchmarks. Death Wish now ships measured experiments instead of guessing.
A four-person team embedded as the long-term partner.
A dedicated four-person Commence pod (senior engineer, UI designer, project manager, and founder oversight) became the long-term commerce partner the previous vendor failed to be. Two-week sprints, weekly syncs, async-friendly Loom updates. Trust built through delivering, not pitching.
Most of our customers were completely unaware of the change. The improvements have led to six-figure savings and an increase in subscribers. It’s like magic.
Will Critcher · Director of Ecommerce, Death Wish Coffee
Numbers that matter — and a few we didn’t expect.
The system, in production.
Commence facilitated a seamless transition. Most of our customers were completely unaware of the change. The improvements made have led to six-figure savings and an increase in subscribers. It's like magic.
Like what you see? Let's talk about your commerce stack.
A 14-day strategic diagnostic — we audit your current stack, identify the friction worth fixing first, and ship a phased plan with sized investments. Fully credited toward an engagement if we move forward together.
What you walk away with
- ✓A measured map of every friction point in your current commerce flow
- ✓Three phased options — minimum, considered, comprehensive
- ✓Sized investments and timelines, no aspirational ranges
- ✓A clear "don't hire us if…" section. We mean it.
