How Tony’s Chocolonely Unified Commerce with Shopify

Background

Tony's Chocolonely started in 2005 when Dutch journalist Teun van de Keuken made 5,000 Fairtrade, traceable bars to expose child labor in cocoa. The one-time experiment became a full-blown brand. As sales grew in DTC, B2B and reseller channels, a custom-built platform began to buckle under complexity and maintenance demands.

The Challenge

Handling international orders on three separate systems meant endless bug fixes, expensive patchwork, and downtime when too many customers checked out at once. Site speed lagged, TCO climbed, and marketing teams wanted a more flexible canvas to spotlight limited editions, personalised wrappers and B2B pricing tiers—all without wrestling with backend restrictions.

The Shopify Solution

In 2023, Tony's teamed with Ask Phill, a Shopify agency in the Netherlands, to migrate every store into a single Shopify setup. They used Matrixify for bulk data transfer of customers, companies and orders. Then they integrated the Wrapper Creator via Shopify’s API so customers can craft custom chocolate wrappers, stored in customer metafields and shown throughout the experience from cart to email.

On the B2B side, Ask Phill built a “Pay by Invoice” flow with fraud and credit-line checks tied into Tony’s credit assurance system. They also launched the ChocoPortal app on Shopify to manage ladder pricing, volume discounts and flexible rates per corporate segment—all in one dashboard.

Results and Impact

Since going live, Tony’s site loads 2.5× faster, handles peak traffic smoothly, and frees development time for big marketing activations instead of firefighting. Across four key markets they saw double-digit revenue gains, with the US up 70%. Now they can spin up new regions quickly, running on a single Shopify template instead of building from scratch.

The unified platform not only boosts sales but keeps the brand’s ethical mission front and center, letting them focus on ending exploitation in cocoa supply chains. Their site handle high traffic without stalling and it’s finally simple to highlight promotions, new flavors or personalised messages in just a few clicks.