Replacing a 20-year-old fundraising system leads to a 32% revenue increase

About Purdys

Purdys Chocolatier is a Canadian heritage brand founded in 1907, operating 81 retail stores with approximately 1,600 employees. Alongside its core retail and DTC business, Purdys runs two coordinator-led sales models, Fundraising and Group Savings – used by schools, clubs, and community organizations across Canada.

Problem

Purdys’ Fundraising and Group Savings programs were running on a 20-year-old custom-built platform maintained by a single developer. Over time, this system became a single point of failure. As volumes increased and expectations grew, the platform itself, not demand became the constraint. This was no longer a question of feature gaps or technical debt. The risk sat in the foundation: undocumented logic, manual workflows, and deep dependency on one individual for a system that directly handled campaigns, payments, and coordinator trust.

The issues showed up as:

• A mission-critical fundraising platform dependent on one developer and undocumented custom logic
• Manual handling of campaigns, delivery schedules, and coordinator payouts
• Limited visibility into campaign performance and coordinator activity
• Difficulty integrating fundraising flows cleanly with ERP, WMS, and financial systems
• Growing operational risk as volumes increased, especially during peak periods
• A separate legacy Luma frontend on purdys.com that constrained performance and flexibility.

Solution

Unified Adobe Commerce foundation

The legacy Group and Fundraising system was rebuilt on Adobe Commerce and placed under the same instance as purdys.com. This removed the standalone custom platform that had become a single point of failure and replaced it with a shared, supportable foundation for retail, fundraising, and group sales.

Custom fundraising logic

Core business rules – Seasons, Campaigns, Delivery Calendars, and Withdrawals – were rebuilt as native platform functionality. This shifted operational ownership from developers to internal teams and eliminated manual handling that previously increased risk and error rates.

Coordinator-led campaign workflows

Self-serve campaign creation was implemented for coordinators, including campaign setup, public campaign pages, and automatic order linkage. Every order is now tied to a campaign by default, removing reconciliation steps that previously depended on fragile processes.

ERP, WMS, and bank integrations

ERP (Syteline) and WMS integrations were reworked to support Group and Fundraising–specific flows. A new bank integration automated coordinator payouts via e-transfer, removing manual payout processing and reducing financial and operational risk.

Hyvä storefront rebuild (retail)

The legacy Luma frontend on purdys.com was replaced with a Hyvä-based storefront to address performance and peak-readiness risks on the retail side while the fundraising platform was being rebuilt, without introducing cross-project dependency risk.

Analytics and reporting foundation

A new analytics framework was introduced across retail and GnF sites. GA4 tracking, Looker Studio dashboards, and M2BI integration provided campaign-level visibility for the first time, addressing a critical blind spot of the legacy system.

Outcome

• Fundraising and Group Savings managed directly in Magento without developer dependency.
• Campaigns launched and tracked automatically, with consistent data across ERP and WMS.
• Coordinator payouts automated via bank integration.
• Analytics and reporting active for the first time on the GnF programs.
• Retail storefront:
  • purdys.com launched on Hyvä after four months of development
  • Described by the client as the best go-live in the company’s history.
• Measured results after the Hyvä launch:
  • +136.5% conversion rate
  • +23.7% transactions
  • +32.3% revenue
  • -25% bounce rate
  • +45.9% average session duration.
• SEO results within the first month post-launch:
  • +19.7% clicks MoM
  • +11.3% impressions MoM
  • +25.9% revenue YoY from organic traffic.

Dealing with a legacy setup that’s becoming a business risk? We help teams stabilize fragile commerce foundations and get platforms back into a state where growth is possible again. Book a 50-min ROI roadmap session with scandiweb.

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