After 15 Years on EKM and ShopWired, a Vintage Retailer Found the Right Platform

Beat Chapter sells vintage magazines — a niche that demands powerful search and filtering across thousands of unique products. Each item is one-of-a-kind, so customers need to search by era, title, category, and condition.

After years on EKM followed by ShopWired, they were let down by broken promises. Both platforms struggled with the catalogue size, search was poor, page speeds were slow, and support was lacking when issues arose.

They needed a platform that could actually handle their unique requirements — not just promise to.

We migrated the entire catalogue to Astrocart and built custom search functionality tailored to the business.

The bespoke search allows customers to quickly find specific magazines by era, title, publication, and category — something neither EKM nor ShopWired could deliver despite promising they could.

The migration from ShopWired was handled end-to-end by our team, with zero downtime and no lost data. The new store loads dramatically faster and the client can manage their extensive catalogue with ease.

After 15 years across two platforms, Beat Chapter finally has a home:

• Custom search functionality built specifically for vintage magazine catalogues
• Dramatically faster page speeds compared to both EKM and ShopWired
• Zero downtime during migration
• 5-star review after 6 months on the platform
• 15 years of platform frustration resolved