Planet Eclipse — “so much more straightforward than Shopify”

Planet Eclipse, the UK paintball-gear brand, was running its B2B channel on Shopify — and the team had reached the point where the daily friction of working around Shopify’s consumer-first model was outweighing the comfort of the familiar interface.

Shopify is excellent at what it’s built for: D2C commerce, fast launches, big consumer catalogs. The Plus B2B layer that sits on top is functional, but it inherits the D2C information architecture. Every B2B action — building an account-specific catalog, applying tiered pricing, configuring payment terms — requires navigating a UI designed primarily for someone running a consumer storefront. The team felt the surface area.

“Less surface, faster ops”

The team’s brief was specific: a B2B platform whose UI was built for B2B operators. Fewer menus to wade through, less time spent translating consumer concepts into wholesale ones, faster turnaround on routine changes. Turis fit that brief almost exactly — every screen in the admin is a B2B screen, and the things wholesale teams do most often are one or two clicks away rather than five.

“The interface and the customisation of the site is just so much more straightforward than something like Shopify.” Chris Bell, Head of IT at Planet Eclipse, gave the verdict after the team had been on the platform long enough to compare day-to-day workflows side by side. The reduction in admin surface area was measurable in how long routine tasks took.

Why Turis won the swap

Three factors mattered in the decision. First, the B2B-native checkout — payment terms, NET invoicing, account-level approval flows — was already in place, not bolted on via a partner app. Second, the customisation model fit how Planet Eclipse actually worked: catalog and pricing changes the wholesale team could own, without needing a Shopify partner agency on speed-dial. Third, the migration path was tractable — product data and customer accounts ported in a couple of weeks, not a multi-quarter replatform.

The cost calculation also changed. Shopify Plus has a fixed cost floor that B2B-only operations subsidise more than they should. Turis is priced for what wholesale actually uses, not what a consumer platform charges to participate.

Going live

Roll-out broke into the standard phases — catalog and pricing on the Turis side, account-level pricing rules per customer, ERP and accounting integration plumbed in, branded storefront live, internal team trained, first retailers cut over. The cut-over itself was uneventful: retailers logged into the new portal, the order desk processed orders against the new pipeline, and within a few weeks the Shopify B2B channel was switched off.

What changed day-to-day

The biggest day-to-day shift was the reduction in admin friction. A pricing change for a top-tier retailer used to be a multi-step trip through Shopify’s plus-app stack; on Turis it’s a couple of fields on the customer record. Same outcome, a quarter of the time. Multiplied across a wholesale team’s week, that adds up to real focus regained.

Reporting also improved. B2B-specific reports — by customer, by segment, by region — are first-class in Turis rather than something you assemble from D2C views. The team spends less time exporting CSVs and more time acting on what the data is actually showing.

The takeaway

Replacing Shopify for B2B isn’t about Shopify being broken — it’s about wholesale being a different operational shape from D2C. Planet Eclipse’s experience is a clean example of what happens when the platform’s UI and feature set are built for the people who actually use them every day.