A Wix to Shopify move for a Suffolk reef aquarium accessories maker

Marine Spec is a UK reef aquarium accessories shop that Harry runs from his home in Suffolk. He keeps reef tanks, designs the accessories he wanted and couldn't buy, 3D prints them, and talks about the hobby as The Spiritual Reefer on YouTube. The range runs from frag racks and magnetic feeders to pod hotels, live foods, dry goods and water, with Spiritual Reefer merchandise alongside.

Every order plants 1 tree through Ecologi, and 10 per cent of profits goes to marine conservation and mental health charities. The shop had been on Wix, and it had reached the point where the platform was holding the catalogue back.

The Wix store held 31 products, and many were the same accessory listed again for each colour, size or magnet strength, so a customer comparing 2 versions of one feeder opened 2 pages and guessed. Nothing matched the way reef keepers search, there were no proper collections, no schema, and no plan for the old addresses if the shop moved.

Harry also had more to say than a product grid allows: who he is, how the 3D printing works, what the channel covers. The brief was a Shopify store that could carry the hobby as well as the stock, without anything going public before he had signed it off.

We built into a Shopify development store, so nothing went public until Harry approved it. The 31 Wix products became 24 Shopify products with 176 variants, because colours, sizes and magnet strengths became options on one product rather than separate listings, and every product photo was given alt text. The keyword research produced 11 collections, among them frag racks, magnetic feeders, pod hotels, live foods, dry goods, water and Spiritual Reefer merchandise.

Pages for Harry, the 3D printing and the channel.
‍
‍Around them sit a Meet Harry page, a custom 3D printing page with a stepped enquiry form for one off parts, and a page for the YouTube videos, so the channel and the shop point at each other.

The theme was designed for this shop and built on Shopify's Online Store 2.0. Reef keeping is precise, so the design is calm and technical: navy throughout, a single orange accent lifted from the clownfish in the logo, and the product photography left to do the talking. Underneath it, every old Wix address was mapped to its new page with a redirect, so no saved link leads to a dead end. Schema was written for the products, the collections, the guides, the videos and Harry himself, with robots.txt, llms.txt and AI sitemaps added so the store reads as clearly to an AI assistant as to Google.