Converging two sites into one headless commerce platform
Challenge
Slingshot Bio makes synthetic cell mimics: engineered particles that stand in for real T, B, and NK cells on any flow cytometer. Their web presence had outgrown its setup, split across a WordPress marketing site on one domain and a Shopify store on another, with no shared design, content model, or data between the two. They needed the two converged into one platform without losing search equity or slowing the team down.
Slingshot Bio makes synthetic cell mimics: engineered particles that stand in for real T, B, and NK cells on any flow cytometer. Their web presence had outgrown its setup, split across a WordPress marketing site on one domain and a Shopify store on another, with no shared design, content model, or data between the two. They needed the two converged into one platform without losing search equity or slowing the team down.
Solution
We built the platform on our open-source Shopify and Sanity starter, turbo-start-shopify. Sanity owns all content, Shopify is reduced to checkout, and Next.js on Vercel keeps the full technical catalogue filtering instantly. Every product is modelled as structured data, so spec sheets, panels, reactivity, and certificates of analysis render from one source and the team can publish a new product without a developer. We instrumented the entire path in PostHog and stitched identity across the headless boundary, so one session can be followed from first landing through to a completed checkout on a separate domain. We also built for how labs actually buy: a researcher can turn a basket into an itemised branded PDF for sign-off, and the cart holds for weeks until approval lands.
We built the platform on our open-source Shopify and Sanity starter, turbo-start-shopify. Sanity owns all content, Shopify is reduced to checkout, and Next.js on Vercel keeps the full technical catalogue filtering instantly. Every product is modelled as structured data, so spec sheets, panels, reactivity, and certificates of analysis render from one source and the team can publish a new product without a developer. We instrumented the entire path in PostHog and stitched identity across the headless boundary, so one session can be followed from first landing through to a completed checkout on a separate domain. We also built for how labs actually buy: a researcher can turn a basket into an itemised branded PDF for sign-off, and the cart holds for weeks until approval lands.
Results
The cutover was seamless. We inventoried every page and resource across both old sites, mapped each to its new home, and built a custom Shopify theme whose only job is redirects, so nothing broke and search equity carried across. The platform launched AI-ready: JSON-LD on every product and resource, clean Markdown served to AI crawlers alongside HTML, an llms.txt, a Markdown sitemap, and a sitemap whose timestamps track Sanity directly.
The cutover was seamless. We inventoried every page and resource across both old sites, mapped each to its new home, and built a custom Shopify theme whose only job is redirects, so nothing broke and search equity carried across. The platform launched AI-ready: JSON-LD on every product and resource, clean Markdown served to AI crawlers alongside HTML, an llms.txt, a Markdown sitemap, and a sitemap whose timestamps track Sanity directly.