The Problem: High Magento Maintenance Costs & Cart Abandonment
Four Seasons Sales & Service has been distributing tanning beds, lamps, and lotions to salons nationwide for four decades. They have about 80 to 85 staff, roughly 10,000 active SKUs, and 4,500 active customer accounts.
For most of their history, they ran on telephone sales. That worked. Then they pushed into ecommerce and built a storefront on Magento 2.
For a while, it worked. Then it didn’t.
Maintenance costs started climbing. Feature requests got expensive. And routine security patches? According to Boyd Neighbors at Four Seasons, even something that simple meant looking at:
“Tens and tens of thousands of dollars just to do something simple.”
The Magento build had become a stack of individual plugins and custom code. Every piece had to work together to deliver basic B2B functionality. The seams showed.
The real damage showed up on the customer side. The checkout process had gotten so cumbersome that it became a competitive liability:
“The interfacing with the site and the checkout process was so abrasive that we actually lost customers to a competitor, just simply on the basis that their website was easier to use.”
That was the tipping point. When your checkout is sending customers to a rival, the math on staying put changes completely.
There was a second cost that never showed up on an invoice. B2B commerce has its own logic: pricing tiers, account hierarchies, order rules, and a general development agency rarely understands why any of it works the way it does. Boyd found himself spending more time explaining his business than actually running it. Before a single line of code got written, he had to justify the context behind every request. In his words, he was more of a translator than anything else. That overhead adds up, and it slows everything down.
With Zoey, Boyd stopped being a translator. The team already spoke B2B fluently: no context-setting, no justifying why things needed to work a certain way. He could focus on running his business instead of explaining it.
Why Zoey
When Four Seasons went looking for alternatives, the field narrowed fast.
BigCommerce meant returning to large development costs. Shopify had some B2B functionality but, in their assessment, was slow to come around and not fully built for their needs. A colleague surfaced Zoey alongside a couple of other options. Against their internal checklist of must-haves, it was, as Boyd put it, a very utilitarian decision.
Two things stood out:
- Predictable pricing. An enterprise licensing model gave them most of what they needed on a fixed quarterly rate. No more surprise invoices every time they needed a patch or a new feature.
- B2B fluency. Zoey’s team already understood B2B context. The constant translation work stopped. “With you guys,” Boyd said, “I really just don’t have to do that anymore.”
Before signing, the proposal went in front of the full C-suite: president, CFO, VP of purchasing and operations. This wasn’t a side project. It was a company-level bet.
The Solution: Migrating Magento to Zoey’s B2B Ordering Portal
This was a migration, not a greenfield launch. That distinction matters. Moving data between differently structured systems means some things plug in cleanly and some don’t. Four Seasons went in clear-eyed about that.
The build centered on four pieces:
- API integration with a legacy ERP. Four Seasons runs an IBM i-Series (AS/400) system that has been in place since the 1990s and has been heavily modified ever since. Rather than replace it, they integrated Zoey into it through the platform’s API and kept their existing import and export data flows intact.
- A 40-year pricing model, migrated. Decades of competing pricing arrangements had to be moved into a structure a modern platform could run. This was the heaviest lift. It required hundreds of hours of internal data and product cleanup and accounted for most of the nine-month timeline.
- Custom freight logic. A non-standard shipping setup was built to match how Four Seasons actually ships, rather than forcing them into a generic model.
- A self-service storefront with a validation-aware backend. The admin side tells the customer-care team exactly what is missing when setting up a customer or product, and links directly to the field that needs fixing. That matters for a team that isn’t deeply technical.
The warehouse fulfillment workflow did not change at all. That was the explicit goal. The people fulfilling orders, the group Boyd calls the most important group around here, experienced the platform switch as a non-event. They don’t even notice it.
Zero back-office disruption. For the fulfillment team, the platform switch was a non-event. Same workflow, same process, same inputs. Nothing about how they do their jobs changed. A new system went live and they didn’t feel a thing.
Conclusion
For Four Seasons, moving off Magento was not just a platform change. It was a shift away from expensive maintenance, constant workaround-building, and a buying experience that had started to push customers elsewhere. By moving to Zoey, they replaced a fragile plugin-heavy system with a B2B ordering portal built around the realities of their business: legacy ERP integration, complex customer pricing, wholesale ordering patterns, and a customer-care team that needed clarity, not more technical burden.
The financial impact alone tells the story: switching to Zoey saved Four Seasons well into six figures, eliminating the developer retainers, plugin licenses, and emergency fixes that Magento demanded just to stay operational.
The result is a faster, easier, more self-service experience for thousands of buyer accounts, without disrupting the back-office workflows that keep orders moving. Customers are calling less because they need less help. Sales reps have more time for the relationships that still matter by phone. And Four Seasons now has a platform that can handle peak season volume, large carts, and long-standing B2B complexity without making the business pay every time it needs to move forward.
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