BODi Migrated 1 Million Payment Methods to Shopify Without Losing a Subscriber

BODi has been in the fitness business long enough to have sold workouts on VHS. Founded as Beachbody in 1998 by Carl Daikeler and Jon Congdon, the company built a $2.9 billion public business on P90X, Insanity, and a coach-driven multi-level marketing network — then spent 2022 through 2024 dismantling that same MLM engine, rebranding to BODi, and migrating its entire commerce stack off a fully custom headless build on Commercetools onto Shopify. The migration is the case study's cleanest success: more than 1 million stored payment methods and 818,000+ active subscriptions moved in under eight months at a 99.5% average success rate, with checkout conversion rising rather than falling. The company's broader turnaround has been slower and messier, and still isn't finished — which is what makes this a more honest example than most migration stories.

From infomercial VHS tapes to a $2.9 billion SPAC

Carl Daikeler and Jon Congdon started Beachbody in Santa Monica in 1998 with $500,000 in angel funding and a website that sold workout videos. The company's first real hit came in 2005 with P90X, Tony Horton's cross-training infomercial program, followed by Insanity and later 21 Day Fix — the kind of late-night-television fitness brand recognizable to anyone who owned a TV in the 2000s. In 2009 the company added Shakeology, a subscription nutrition shake, giving the business a recurring-revenue product line to sit alongside one-time program sales. By 2014, annual revenue had passed $1 billion.

The growth engine underneath all of it was Team Beachbody, a multi-level marketing network formed in 2006 that paid independent "coaches" commissions for recruiting both customers and other coaches, not just for selling product directly. That structure is what let a home-fitness infomercial business scale into a public company: coaches did the customer-acquisition work that a typical DTC brand pays for in ad spend. It's also the structure the company would spend most of the 2020s trying to unwind.

The pandemic was Beachbody's best, and in hindsight most complicating, year. Home-fitness demand spiked as gyms closed, and digital subscribers reportedly passed 2 million in April 2020 alone, climbing toward 2.6 million later that year. Riding that momentum, Beachbody announced in February 2021 that it would go public through a three-way merger with Forest Road Acquisition Corp., a SPAC backed by former Disney executives Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs, and Myx Fitness, a connected-bike startup. The deal valued the combined company at $2.9 billion and was expected to add more than $420 million to the balance sheet. It closed on June 28, 2021, and the company began trading on the NYSE under the ticker BODY.

The engine the company spent years trying to shut off

The tailwind didn't last. As gyms reopened and pandemic-era subscription growth reversed, revenue fell every year from 2021 onward: roughly $873 million in 2021, $696 million in 2022, and $527 million in 2023 — a two-year decline of more than 40%. An MLM structure that had been an efficient acquisition engine when demand was high became an expensive, hard-to-manage cost center once it wasn't, and it carried legal exposure a normal DTC ad budget doesn't: in May 2023, a former coach filed a class-action lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court alleging Beachbody misclassified its California coaches as independent contractors rather than employees, arguing the state's direct-sales exemption didn't apply to a business that processes its own online sales rather than relying on door-to-door transactions.

The company's response arrived in stages rather than all at once. In March 2023, Beachbody rebranded to BODi, adopting a "health esteem" positioning distinct from the old infomercial-and-recruiting identity — timed, whether deliberately or not, almost exactly alongside the coach-classification lawsuit. It wasn't until September 2024 that the company went further and announced it would eliminate the MLM network entirely, replacing it with a single-level affiliate program in which sellers keep 100% of their commission rather than earning overrides on downline recruits. The company's own language was blunt: multi-level marketing, it said, was "outdated and unsustainable" given current market dynamics and consumer preferences. The restructuring cut roughly a third of the workforce — close to 200 employees — targeting about $54 million in annual savings, and centralized the business around a single ecommerce platform at BODi.com. The MLM network fully sunset by January 1, 2025.

Why a company would walk away from a fully custom headless build

Before Shopify, BODi ran its commerce stack on Commercetools, a headless, API-first platform that gives engineering teams maximum control by handing them essentially nothing pre-built — no checkout, no theme layer, no native subscription logic. That's an attractive pitch when a company has the engineering headcount to build exactly what it needs and the roadmap stability to justify the investment. It's a much worse fit for a company mid-crisis, laying off a third of its staff, trying to consolidate three business lines — digital streaming, physical nutrition products, and a shrinking coach network — onto one platform, and needing its remaining engineers building the product experiences that actually differentiate BODi from a generic MLM wind-down.

Jared Thigpen, BODi's SVP of Technology, put the calculus plainly in Shopify's case study: "We wanted to take advantage of features that were already built. The amount of engineering we were spending on maintaining a custom commerce stack was too much for where the business was going." That's a specific admission — not that Commercetools was a bad platform in the abstract, but that a fully custom headless build had become a luxury the company's actual engineering capacity and business trajectory could no longer support. Maintaining the Commercetools stack had required roughly five core commerce engineers, with as many as eight across commerce and merchandising combined, at a company that had just cut its overall headcount by a third.

The reallocation is the real payoff. Shopify's own estimate is that running BODi's storefront on Shopify Plus takes 2–3 engineers at roughly 50% capacity — a fraction of what the Commercetools build required — freeing 4–5 engineers to work on the digital streaming platform, the consumer app, and consolidating BODi's various web properties instead of maintaining commerce plumbing. For a company that had just told the market its future depended on digital subscriptions and nutrition rather than a coach network, that reallocation is arguably a more important number than the payment-migration statistics that headline the case study.

What actually had to move

The technical challenge wasn't the storefront — it was moving live, chargeable financial instruments without breaking anyone's billing. Shopify's case study breaks the payment-method migration down by region: in the US, 822,000 cards moved in the main migration at 99.9% success, with a further 78,000 "delta" cards — accounts that changed between the initial data pull and cutover — migrating at the same 99.9% rate. Canada moved 110,000 cards at 99.9% plus 9,100 delta cards at 99.8%. The UK, the smallest and hardest market, moved 8,500 cards at 99.5% plus 911 delta cards at 97.6%. Combined, that's more than 1 million payment methods across three storefronts at a 99.5% blended average success rate — and some of the subscriptions attached to those cards had been on file for more than 15 years, predating most of the engineering team working on the migration.

Subscriptions moved separately, through Recharge, at a 99.9% success rate across 818,000+ active accounts. The single hardest technical piece, per BODi's own account, wasn't the volume — it was that BODi runs a combined digital-streaming-and-physical-nutrition subscription model, a pairing Shopify's case study calls rare enough that customizing the account and subscription-management pages required ongoing three-way collaboration between BODi, Shopify Professional Services, and Recharge's own product team, rather than something BODi could stand up from a template.

The part every migration case study wants and few get: conversion went up

The instinct going into a migration this large and this payment-sensitive is to treat "nothing broke" as the win condition. BODi beat that bar by a wide margin: checkout conversion rose 10 percentage points at launch. What makes that number more credible rather than less is what BODi didn't do to get it. Heather Fredrickson, BODi's Director of Consumer Engineering, was specific about this in the case study: "We did not add new features. If anything, we took away a payment method. That's a compelling example of just all the little things Shopify has tested and tested and tested." In other words, the lift came from adopting a checkout Shopify has already optimized across its entire merchant base, not from BODi engineering a better one from scratch — the exact inversion of what a custom headless build is supposed to deliver.

One specific, granular fix stood out: standardizing every product page onto a single consistent /product URL path, which resolved a navigation bug on the old site that made it hard for customers to get back to a product page from their cart. It's the kind of detail that never makes a press release on its own but is exactly the category of fix a native, well-instrumented checkout surfaces and a bespoke one can hide for years. Conversion improved further once Shop Pay was enabled, adding a second lift on top of the base migration.

Performance told a similar story. Lab testing showed the homepage loading in 4,558ms post-migration versus 6,040ms before — a 25% improvement — with collection and product pages each roughly 14% faster. Real-user data at the 75th percentile on mobile showed the homepage loading in 1.9 seconds and collection and product pages between 1.5 and 1.7 seconds, comfortably inside Google's "good" Core Web Vitals thresholds. For a company that had just told the market its commerce platform was consuming engineering resources it needed elsewhere, better performance was effectively a byproduct of doing less custom work, not a separate initiative someone had to staff.

The turnaround the migration didn't fix by itself

It's worth being precise about what the Shopify migration did and didn't do for BODi's business. By every metric the case study reports, the migration itself was close to flawless — high success rates, improved conversion, freed engineering capacity, faster pages. None of that stopped revenue from falling another 21% in 2024, to $418.8 million, alongside a $20 million goodwill impairment tied to the sustained decline in both stock price and revenue. Full-year 2025 revenue fell a further 40%, to $251.7 million. A platform migration can remove a cost center and a conversion drag; it cannot, by itself, replace the demand a shrinking MLM network used to generate, and BODi's numbers through 2024 and into 2025 are a clear illustration of that ceiling.

The more encouraging signal came later. Third-quarter 2025 results showed BODi's first net income since going public — $3.6 million, even as revenue fell to $59.9 million from $102.2 million a year earlier — followed by a second consecutive quarter of net income in Q4 2025, nine consecutive quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA, and the company's first full year of operating income since it went public in 2021. Read together, the pattern is a company whose revenue base is still shrinking but whose cost structure — the MLM exit, the Shopify migration's engineering savings, the workforce reduction — has finally caught up to a smaller, DTC-only business. That's a real turnaround signal, but it's a cost-side one; whether BODi can grow revenue again on the leaner base it's built is a separate, still-open question.

What this means for a Shopify D2C brand rebuilding under pressure

BODi is a useful case study precisely because it refuses to be a clean success story. The migration itself is close to a best-case example of how to move a large, payment-sensitive, subscription-heavy business onto Shopify: real success-rate numbers by region, a short cutover window, a documented hypercare period, and a conversion lift that came from adopting tested defaults rather than building custom ones. Any brand planning a similarly high-stakes migration — real stored payment methods, real active subscriptions, no room for a bad week of billing errors — should treat BODi's approach (regional migration batches, a delta pass to catch late changes, a defined hypercare window with fast-follow triage) as closer to a checklist than an inspiration.

But the more transferable lesson sits one level up: a platform migration is a cost and capability fix, not a demand fix. BODi's engineering team stopped bleeding hours into maintaining a custom headless build and got measurably better conversion and page speed for it — genuinely valuable outcomes. None of that reversed the revenue decline that had been running since 2021, because the decline was caused by an unwinding business model, not by Commercetools. A Shopify brand under similar pressure — shrinking a channel, cutting headcount, rebuilding around a leaner core — should expect a well-executed migration to free up capacity and remove friction, and should not expect it to substitute for fixing whatever is actually shrinking the top line. BODi's own numbers, cost discipline paying off years before revenue growth returns, are the honest version of what that sequencing actually looks like. For the retention-side mechanics a migration like this is built to protect, see our guide to the Klaviyo flows every D2C brand needs.