Serving Aces Shopify POS Launch Case Study

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Shopify POS Launch: Serving Aces

Sector

Sporting Goods

Our Role

POS & Retail Commerce Strategy Hardware Specification Launch QA

Platform

Shopify

Website

servingaces.com.au

Serving Aces is a specialist tennis retailer in Moonee Ponds, Melbourne, trading in-store and online since 2010. When the business changed hands in August 2026, the new owners had a fortnight to replace a shop floor running on a local, early-2000s retail system before every sale had to start landing in a new entity's books. Atlas was referred by Shopify to get Shopify POS live inside that window. We specified the hardware, sequenced what had to migrate and what could wait, and found two things that would have stopped the terminal working on the first morning.

Atlas Studios

A point-of-sale launch run to a settlement date, delivered on legacy counter hardware and a catalogue someone else had already imported. The measure was whether the shop could trade on the first morning, not whether the project plan looked tidy. Live on Shopify POS in 14 days

Why a change of ownership is a point-of-sale deadline

Legacy retail systems rarely fail. They just quietly keep your in-store customer and your online customer as two different people, and nobody notices until someone needs a number that spans both. Buying a business removes that luxury. From settlement, every transaction has to land in the right entity on a system the new owners can see into, which turns point of sale from an IT project into part of the sale itself.

Our Unified Commerce team covered four areas: hardware specification against Shopify's supported device list for Australia, migration sequencing and scope, the back-end conditions a POS terminal needs before it will pair, and final launch QA.

Rigour here is mostly about order, and about checking things before they matter. We assessed the three in-store peripherals individually rather than assuming a clean sweep, because two of them were fine and one wasn't. The barcode gap needed a cross-match rather than a re-import: export through Matrixify, because barcode isn't a column in Shopify's native product export, match against the identifiers held in the old retail system, then re-import that single column rather than overwriting a catalogue someone had already built.

What the owners got was a counter that worked on the first morning and a clear line between what had to happen before settlement and what could wait until after it. We also told them not to pay us to verify their own catalogue against WooCommerce – slow manual work they could do faster and cheaper themselves. The online store has since moved onto Shopify as well, so retail and online now share one customer record and one view of stock. Restringing is the last thing still running outside it.

THE PROJECT

Serving Aces is a specialist tennis retailer in Moonee Ponds, Melbourne, trading since 2010. Racquets, strings, footwear, bags and balls, with restringing as a counter service – the kind of shop where the advice across the counter is half the reason people come in, and a genuine specialist rather than a generalist sports chain. It sells in-store and online across Australia. In August 2026, after sixteen years under its original ownership, the business changed hands.

The new owners needed Shopify POS live in the store, quickly. Not for its own sake. A change of ownership means every sale from day one has to land in the new entity's books, on a system the people now responsible for it can actually see into. This was not a turnaround. It was a healthy business running on infrastructure that could not scale, and the settlement date set the deadline rather than a roadmap.

Four systems, none of which talked to each other. The online store ran on WooCommerce. The shop floor ran on MYOB Retail Manager, a local-only application on a single machine with no API and no way to grant remote access – data left it as a manual Excel export or it didn't leave at all. Accounting sat in MYOB. Restringing ran on a separate cloud app billed per job. An in-store customer and an online customer were two different people as far as the business was concerned, and the barcodes on the shelf lived in a system nothing else could read. We came in on 12 August. Handover was the 17th.

Retail first, online second. The ownership change made point of sale the deadline-critical piece, so we supported a phased cutover rather than arguing for a single switch – the website could wait a fortnight on WordPress. We were explicit about what that phasing would cost while it lasted. Until the online store moved to Shopify, online orders would have to come off Shopify stock by hand, and the unified customer view would only be half true. The owners took that trade knowingly. On data, we migrated what earned its keep: products, customers and stock in, order history out.

Our Unified Commerce team audited the counter hardware against Shopify's supported device list for Australia. The Epson TM-T82II receipt printer couldn't be used, so we specified an Epson TM-m30III in its place, confirmed the Posiflex cash drawer, and set the POS-mate barcode scanner to pair in Bluetooth HID mode. The counter PC was retired in favour of an iPad: Shopify POS pairs a terminal by scanning a QR code, so the till needs a camera.

Two things would have stopped launch day. The store was still a development store with Shopify Payments switched off, which prevents a terminal pairing at all and is invisible from the storefront. And the catalogue, already imported from WooCommerce, had arrived without barcodes. We found both before the hardware landed and specified the fix for each.

The counter was live on Shopify POS on 26 August, fourteen days after we started.

The Client

Serving Aces is a specialist tennis retailer in Moonee Ponds, Melbourne, trading since 2010. Racquets, strings, footwear, bags and balls, with restringing as a counter service – the kind of shop where the advice across the counter is half the reason people come in, and a genuine specialist rather than a generalist sports chain. It sells in-store and online across Australia. In August 2026, after sixteen years under its original ownership, the business changed hands.