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The Comprehensive Guide to Bundling on Shopify

Posted on by Taylor

Bundling (packaging related products or services together at a discounted price) in e-commerce is proven to increase average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLV), and overall sales for merchants. In addition, bundling provides added value, convenience and potentially bulk savings for your customers. In fact, according to Shopify, “First-time buyers are 27% likely to return, but after their second or third purchase, this grows to 54%.” Bundling for e-commerce brands has evolved over the years continuing to prove its efficacy, with more upselling and cross-selling data fueling elements like dynamic and AI-powered bundling systems. 

Why are Merchants so Keen on Bundling?

Fundamentally, bundling is about boosting your AOV, but it’s so much more than that. We’ve compiled a list of additional benefits for bundling, check it out:

  • Greater Product Selection: Customers can see products that complement each other or are frequently purchased together and are incentivized to add more to their cart with a bundle discount.
  • Unique Discounts: Offering discounts for a unique group of products gives your customer the impression they are getting a deal designed just for them. Create a discounted bundle that is attractive enough to encourage purchases, but be careful not to cut too deep into your margins so you’re losing money on each sale. Make sure the discount the customer receives is prominently displayed and show the regular prices alongside the bundled deal to really highlight the value!
  • Optimize Sales with Lesser Known Products: Strategically combine underperforming items with high-demand ones, such as new or lesser-known products or overstocked inventory. This approach motivates customers to buy both the popular and lesser-known items, benefiting the merchant (moving inventory) and the customer (ensuring they get what they need!)
  • Incentivized Conversion: Create a sense of urgency by making the bundle deal a limited time offer, nudging customers to hit that buy button sooner rather than later. In addition, consider offering different tiers of bundles with increasing value. This way, you cater to all sorts of shoppers and increase that AOV.
  • Personalization: Use customer data and purchase history to create personalized bundles just for them. Personalizing your product offerings will help increase loyalty, email and SMS open rates, and conversions.
  • Cross-selling: Bundle related or supporting add-on products together that enhance the customers experience with the main product to encourage a higher AOV and a better purchasing experience.
  • Free Shipping Thresholds: Test out the pricing on some of your bundles to ensure the overall purchase qualifies for free shipping. For example, Ambaum helped an alcohol brand create a bundle using Shopify’s native bundling feature of 4 products that was priced just north of $50 so the overall bundle qualified for free shipping. 
  • Testing, testing, testing: Regularly analyze the performance of your bundled offer, mix up the products, tweak the discounts, and change how you display them to determine what works best for your particular customer.

Challenges with Bundling on Shopify

Bundling can really supercharge your AOV and add to your top line revenue, but you need to consider some of the potential issues when you first get started. Many merchants are unaware that when you create a new bundle you could also unintentionally create downstream issues that cause incorrect product counts in both your store and your warehouse. Also many out of the box bundle apps don’t offer custom functionality or may be incompatible with customizations you built into your Shopify theme.

Here’s some common challenges that merchants face when implementing bundling: 

  • Inventory Management Issues: Depending on how you create your bundles you might find it tricky to break them apart in Shopify checkout into discrete products post purchase. For example, if you have an inventory management system or ERP that connects to Shopify, it’s important that each product in a bundle accurately gets updated in your inventory counts. In addition, if you set up bundles in your store you will want to work closely with your 3PL or warehouse employees so they know which SKUs go into each bundle for shipping.
  • Dynamic Bundles won’t work with Shopify Scripts: Dynamic bundles allow customers to select individual products and create a personalized bundle. Creating a dynamic bundle can be a home run for AOV, but merchants need to be careful using out of the box bundle apps. Shopify’s native bundling feature doesn’t work with Shopify scripts and if you publish a script, the bundles are moved to a draft status. Dynamic bundles are a big win for merchants, but often a more custom solution is required to set it up correctly.
  • Customized Checkout Difficulties: If you have customized checkout.liquid on your Shopify store, it’s important to know that checkout.liquid customizations aren’t compatible with Shopify’s native bundle functionality.
  • Point of Sale and Payment Processing Problems: If you are using Shopify POS for in store sales, you can’t create and sell bundles using native bundle functionality. In addition, some apps and payment gateways aren’t fully compatible with bundles.
  • Bundles and Subscription Orders, What to Watch for: Brands want the flexibility to offer bundles both as one-time purchases and as subscription options. At Ambaum this might be one of the most common feature requests we get from Shopify Plus merchants. Recharge is the most common subscription application on Shopify and they allow you to add bundles to subscriptions, but you must be on Recharge Pro or have access to the bundles SDK.
  • Track Bundle Metrics so you don’t Lose Money: Merchants need to track the performance of different bundle offerings and understand which bundles are most popular and profitable. Over time the cost inputs that go into your products will change and if you’re not careful you might be losing money selling your bundles. Customers might get wise to your mistakes and only purchase bundles that give heavy discounts on certain products.

Shopify Bundle Apps

Let’s dive into a few tech partner’s solutions, the pricing, and the advantages (and disadvantages) of each. Then, we’ll take you through a detailed bundling solution we built for one of our clients.

1. Rebuy

Description: Rebuy utilizes personalized customization by blending exclusive AI/ML technology with various software approaches (no-code, low-code, and custom code), top-tier integrations, flexible merchandising rules, and methodical A/B/n testing. This comprehensive solution empowers brands to create data-guided shopping experiences across the entire customer journey, spanning from the initial homepage visit, through the checkout process, and even after the purchase is completed.

Cost: 

  • $99/month for 1K orders
  • $249/month for 2.5K orders
  • $499/month for 5K orders

Features and advantages: 

  • Resources on best practices for businesses new to upselling, cross-selling, and bundling.
  • Adds the individual SKUs to the cart for better tracking.
  • Ability to add one-click subscription upgrade in the cart.
  • You can also suggest add on products based on: cart contents, past orders, browsing history, AI, etc.
  • Can create custom reorder landing pages.
  • Free Shipping incentives; for example, “add this product to reach the free shipping limit”  in the cart or at checkout.
  • Post purchase offers on the Thank you page.
  • Integrates with Recharge and Stamped.

Disadvantages:

  • Rebuy has many different widgets you can use to add functionality to your Shopify store. These widgets allow you to do upsells, cross-sells, gift with purchase, and even upgrade to offer subscriptions. One thing to note is that it requires 2 widgets to fully setup subscription products & bundles on Rebuy, so plan to invest some time fully understanding their widget landscape.
  • For one-time purchases or subscriptions, the current Rebuy backend takes some time to learn as it uses the “data source” as the bundle creator.

Please see the supporting case study below for in-depth examples on the Rebuy bundling setup.

2. Recharge

Description: Recharge stands as a reliable solution for managing subscriptions. With Recharge, you can expand your subscription-based enterprise and empower your customers to oversee their subscriptions seamlessly from your store. There are plenty of customization options to craft the subscription journey you have in mind. Furthermore, they offer integrated solutions that effortlessly connect with your existing technology toolkit.

Cost: 

  • $99/month for Standard Plan, to add Bundles to a Standard Plan is an additional $199/month
  • $499/month Pro Plan (includes Bundles)

Features and advantages: 

  • Supporting documentation to help create a “build-your-own-box” experience.
  • Easy to create: set up the bundle in Recharge and it will add the new Bundle product to Shopify.
  • When Bundle is added to the cart it only shows the Bundle SKU- not the contents of the bundle.
  • Displays one-time or subscription offerings just like single products.
  • If you would like the bundle to have options (a dynamic bundle) you create collections of each offering. For example: breakfast, lunch, dinner collections for a daily meal bundle.  

Disadvantages: 

  • Costs an extra $199/mo if you do not have the Pro Plan.
  • Potential issue with analytics as all bundle sales show one more product purchased (i.e. bundle products + the bundle itself).

3. Shopify Bundle App

Description: With Shopify Bundles, you gain the capability to effortlessly craft bundled packages and multipacks directly within your Shopify administrative panel. Your customers can easily pick from different product variations linked to the bundles. Moreover, Shopify Bundles ensures that inventory is constantly updated in real-time, eliminating concerns about overextending stock.

Cost: 

  • Free on Shopify and Shopify Plus
  • If not on Shopify: Subscriptions range from $39 – $2,000 per month, with annual options shaving off 25% 

Features and advantages: 

  • Easy to set up in Shopify admin.
  • Ability to create fixed and multipack bundles.
  • Inventory is updating in real-time to protect from overselling product.

Disadvantages: 

To use the Shopify Bundles App, your store must meet the following requirements:

  • Your store must be using the Online Store sales channel. Other sales channels aren’t yet supported.
  • You must unpublish all Shopify Scripts.
  • Your store must not use any checkout.liquid customizations or features. Reverting to checkout.liquid will make your store incompatible with the Shopify Bundle App.
  • Your store must not use the following apps: Global-e, Licensify, Exemptify, Recharge Subscriptions.
  • Does not support mix and match.

Need help getting started with Shopify or Shopify Plus? Schedule your complimentary 30 minute consultation today.

Case Study: Custom Bundling Solution for Premier Catch

Choosing a bundling solution for the premium seafood brand Premier Catch was a no-brainer to increase customer retention, loyalty, and lead generation. With the need to move forward with bundling, we chose to implement Rebuy’s dynamic bundling product as many additional services Rebuy offered suited the current and ongoing needs of the brand:

In order to implement the bundling strategy for the brand, we built and implemented the following step-by-step guide:

Step 1: Create a Product Page widget in the Rebuy App:

Step 2: Click the “New Widget” button in the top right. Or Duplicate an existing widget to copy the settings needed to keep styles and format consistent. Click the 3 vertical dots on the far right or the widget you wish to duplicate to expand the menu and then click the “Duplicate” button.

Step 3: If Creating a New Widget, scroll down to the “Dynamic Bundle” option and click “Create New”. 

For compatibility with the custom widget toggle block in the Shopify theme, it will be very important to set and differentiate between the two widgets needed per bundle. Name each bundle widget according to its bundle relation and purchase type (ex: Salmon Lovers Bundle – One Time or Salmon Lovers Bundle – Subscription)

Widgets can be renamed in the “General” settings accordion menu on the right side as well as setting the product type between “One Time Only” or “Subscription Only”.

The “Data Source” menu on the right side will be used to select which endpoint to use with the widget. The data source endpoint manages which products show in the widget. A “One Time Only” and “Subscription Only” widget can share the same “Data Source” endpoint.

Step 4: For custom bundles widgets a custom endpoint will need to be created for each bundle. When a widget is duplicated it will continue to use the same data source. To create a new data source, click on the “Data Sources” menu item on the left and click “New Ruleset”.

Step 5: Editing the data source will only require one rule since it applies to only one bundle. Name the data source and check “filter input product” Set the first IF to “Anything” so that the widget isn’t expecting a data check. The RETURN should be set to “Specific Products”, which can be selected from the search field next to the dropdown.

Step 6: Go back to the widgets and make sure the review is showing the expected products. Keep note of the widgets’ ID as they will be needed from adding to the PDP section.

Step 7: Go to Shopify Admin.

IN SHOPIFY:

Step 1: In the Shopify customizer, create a new template for the new bundle.

NOTE: if this will not work if bundles share the same product template. Each bundle should have its own template.

Click “Online Store”.

Step 2: Click Customize on the live theme.

Step 3: From the top middle drop down select Products.

Step 4: Select Create Template.

Step 5: Name it specific to the Bundle being created- no spaces.

Step 6: Select an already created bundle template like “salmon-lovers-bundle” under “Based on”.

And select Create Template.

Step 7: Select or add the “Rebuy Widget Toggle” block in the Product pages (assume images below are on your new “bundle-name” template).

Step 8: FIll in the appropriate widget IDs to their corresponding fields and hit save. The page should reload with the rebuy widgets ready to use.

Connect the new template to the new bundle product in the Shopify admin.

Step 9: Create a new product with the bundle name, or select the already existing product in Shopify.

Step 10: On the product change the Theme template to the new template created above. 

Step 11: ALL DONE

At the end of the day, the data makes the decisions, and building these foundations into your strategy will provide the pillars for long term success. 

The last option we’ll float here is, rather than setting it and forgetting about it, consider looping in an experienced leader in the e-commerce industry, who has Shopify experts and seasoned merchants to uplift your business. If you’re looking to increase your average order value, customer lifetime value, and customer loyalty through bundling, contact us and let’s talk. Our initial conversations are always free and informal, so let’s sit down for a chat.

RAM® Mounts

Posted on by Taylor

Previous Platform: Custom

Industry: Mounting Solutions

Use Case: Integration to Shopify Plus

Company Summary

Created in 1990, RAM® Mounts is the manufacturing leader for mounting solutions that are reliable and adaptable for almost any application or device. RAM® Mounts is the most cutting-edge product line of its kind, including almost 5,000 modular parts. These parts, built on an interchangeable ball and socket system and built around an elastomeric rubber ball, include anti-slip properties as well as shock and vibration absorption. The innovative RAM® Mounts system’s patent-protected design offers easy installation, adaptability, and durability at a reasonable cost.

Project Summary

Ambaum helped RAM® Mounts create a plan to replatform from their own custom ecommerce site to Shopify Plus. The project broke out into 3 phases: create a custom theme for RAM® Mounts, assist the merchant with data migration, and help them create custom functionality on their new site by building a custom application. The final outcome of the project was a new Shopify Plus site with functionality similar to their old site plus UI updates and the ability for customers to build their own RAM® Mounts.

RAM® Mounts Custom Theme

To create the new theme, Ambaum worked closely with RAM® Mounts to make sure all of the functionality on the old site was recreated on the new Shopify Plus site. We worked with RAM® Mounts to build a more robust mega nav and developed templated landing pages that were reusable for many of the brands that RAM® Mounts supports.

Ambaum created a custom theme for RAM® Mounts and made sure to incorporate all of the latest Shopify infrastructure updates that rolled out in the summer of 2022. There were a number of important features added, the first one was we created the custom theme with sections everywhere which allows RAM® Mounts to use the Shopify UI to drag and drop sections on the site without having to get into the code. In addition, Ambaum used metafields in multiple places on the site, one example is on the product detail page where we were able to create a “complete your solution” section which is effectively a recommended products section, as seen here. The product template uses variant metafields to easily swap product data based on the variant selected, for example: images, tabbed data, pricing, title, description, etc.

About Us Page Customization

The about us page template is a custom page we created within the theme that allows the merchant to easily manage the content of the page. The about us page has multiple tabs, and each tab is a unique page that can be edited within the Shopify Editor. The benefit of this is the ease of use for the merchant going forward as opposed to requiring custom development to update and maintain.

Collection Page Functionality

RAM® Mounts products all had “facet data” aka metadata on them which allowed for very custom filtering. There are “tiles” on the existing collection pages and some of them have size data that is needed for extra filtering. Ambaum helped RAM® Mounts think through a couple paths for their collection filtering; path 1 was for us to create custom filtering logic and path 2 was to utilize a Shopify app to give them the required functionality. We eventually settled on using Product Filter and Search, a powerful app that gave RAM® Mounts the ability to leverage the metadata on all of their products and give them the custom filtering they needed.

RAM® Mounts Custom Builder

RAM® Mounts requested that Ambaum help them create a brand new feature on their site that allows customers to select the optimal mount based on vehicle, device and mounting location. With this custom builder, the user is prompted to go through a set of questions  to determine which products are most  applicable for the customer’s situation. If you take a look at the images below you can get an idea of what it looks like from the customer’s perspective to use this custom mount builder.

RAM® Mounts had their own internal IT team and was very hands on with us as we created their new Shopify Plus site. One example of how we worked very closely together was around the API feed needed for the custom product builder. RAM® Mounts provided the API feed that sent the data to the product builder to enable a customer to make their selections from the drop-down menus. Ambaum then built this functionality by utilizing Shopify’s Section Rendering API. This alters page content without reloading the entire page based on the user’s selections.

One final thing Ambaum did was develop this custom RAM® Mounts builder with Shopify reusable components that will allow us to create this same builder functionality for many other product lines in the RAM® Mounts catalog. The client indicated to us that it was important that our code was reusable as they had big plans to roll this feature out to other lines in the future. 

Summary

At Ambaum we have been fortunate to work with a number of parts companies and help them replatform to Shopify Plus. RAM® Mounts was an intense project with a lot of theme customizations, API work and data management. We didn’t want to just build a custom site for the merchant, we needed to implement reusable code to help them manage their site internally without having to rely solely on developers for future updates. As you can see from the quote above, the client was very happy with their new site and can see the benefit of a platform like Shopify to help drive their companies growth.

Have questions about how Ambaum can help your organization in the next step toward scalable success? Reach out to us today and let’s hop on a call to go over your needs.

Hammerhead

Posted on by David Stober

Hammerhead

Hammerhead is building the future of cycling by only building products they believe will be the best in their class, and are fully focused on making Karoo 2 the world’s best cycling computer. Hammerhead came to Ambaum in early 2021 looking for a development partner for their website hammerhead.io and to create four new expansion stores in CA, AU, UK and EU.

We initially helped Hammerhead with writing scripts in the Shopify Plus script editor for discounts and custom logic to support various marketing campaigns. Hammerhead utilizes Klaviyo for email marketing automation, which we used to set up promotional emails with unique/dynamic discount code fields.

Prior to working with Ambaum Hammerhead was using a page builder for most pages on their website. We rebuilt their homepage, multiple PDP templates, and tweaked collection templates, and cart using ThemeKit. A major part of the rebuild was creating a new system to sync data across all five stores. We needed to make sure shared data could easily be synced across all five stores, while ensuring store-specific data could be added/updated. We used the US store as the base, deploying to all four expansion stores at once using code, which minimized manual work. Since the website was built pre Shopify 2.0, we utilized metafields on the product detail pages where we used metafields to be able to add, remove and rearrange sections.

As Hammerhead’s development partner, Ambaum has not only helped with maintenance work, but also solutioning future designs, building new custom features, and efficiently deploying data and theme updates across all stores.

Pro Compression

Posted on by David Stober

Pro Compression

Compression sock brand.

Pro Compression is a direct-to-consumer powerhouse in the growing athletic category of compression socks. For over a decade, PRO Compression has provided premium compression socks for all your favorite activities. Whether you need the best compression socks for running, walking, home workouts, or for everyday comfort, we have a pair for you. Designed and made in the USA, our compression socks improve circulation, accelerate recovery, reduce muscle soreness, help prevent swelling and varicose veins.

Ambaum has been Pro Compressions agency of choice through their rapid calling first lending support in simply a fractional development to designing and developing their new front-end Shopify Plus store (2022).

Dewey Crush

Posted on by David Stober

Dewey Crush

Regional ready-to-drink cocktail in can brand.

Dewey Crush is a Delaware-based brand with the tagline: We Canned Summer. Their initial three products were designed to take full advantage of the exploding ready-to-drink (RTD) canned cocktail segment of the alcohol and spirits category. Ready-to-drink cocktails are the fastest-growing alcohol product in the country right now, and beverage companies and industry experts are predicting even more growth in the future.

Ambaum was approached in 2021 to form a digital strategy that contemplated zero eCommerce initially but with a changing legal landscape in retail alcohol sales, something that could easily morph in the future to accommodate. So basically, build it on the platform they will eventually fully-leverage for eCommerce – Shopify.

Tactically the work involved setting a roadmap for digital growth and building out the eCommerce stack to accommodate all marketing and features they will be using in the future, but doing so without technically turning on product sales. So this involved building out flavor pages and turning off any sort of shopping functionality, rather pushing users to find their crush at local stores in the Mid-Atlanic. Beyond that relatively light merchandise sales were turned on to offer some level of shopping. But this was done more so as practice then it was for any level of revenue growth.

The activities for the Dewey Crush launched involved full digital strategy, design and build, app integration and marketing systems setup and growth services.

Seven Coffee Roasters

Posted on by Andrew Crawley

Ambaum has been supporting Seven Coffee Roasters since late summer in 2019. Sean Lee approached Ambaum looking for help with a number of services: Shopify site updates, strategy and consulting, design and online advertising help. David Stober, Ambaum’s COO met with Sean and mapped out an initial strategy to help him grow the revenue through his online Shopify store.

The first thing David and Sean discussed was getting a new look and feel for the Seven site. Sean started Seven Coffee Roasters in a small cafe/roastery in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle with the mission of bringing Hawaiian coffee to the mainland. Ambaum setup Seven with a new theme that brought together two brands under one main site and gave everything a smoother and more streamlined look. 

A big focus for Sean was getting more customers signed up with a monthly subscription for his coffee. Seven was already leveraging Recharge’s Shopify app for managing subscriptions but they weren’t getting the most out of it. David and Sean spent many months designing and building out a new product detail page and the outcome was this:

This enhanced product detail page saw a large increase in customers that signed up for a subscription. Before Sean started working with Ambaum he had less than $500/month in subscription customers and within 6 months he was approaching $8,000/month in total subscription revenue. 

Fantastapack

Posted on by Andrew Crawley

Fantastapack believes every business deserves beautifully printed packaging. Fantastapack approached Ambaum in 2018 looking for help with configuring their product detail page to price out large and bulky items. Due to the custom nature of their products, they calculate each custom order’s price based on the size, quantity, and material of the boxes. Formulas for calculating the box dimensions and pricing are stored in Shopify metafields and pricing information is passed on through line item properties and used by a checkout script to set the correct price in checkout.

A lot of our day-to-day work with them has been focused on making front-end improvements and fixes to the site. The complex nature of their PDP means that adding new customization options often requires developer assistance in editing the template to add these new features. One major task Ambaum we accomplished was building a template for a new product, precut box bundles. These products come in a range of predetermined sizes with pre-printed patterns, so customers can order a simple set of boxes when they don’t need a fully custom option. This new product required some custom pricing logic of its own, as the client wanted to offer an increased discount for larger bulk orders. Ambaum came up with code using JavaScript and checkout scripts to calculate the price based on the selected size and quantity of the boxes to arrive at the appropriate discount. 

The VP of Innovation had an idea in 2019 to make it easier for their resellers to place high volume orders. Using Fantastapack.com to enter orders worked for smaller customers, but resellers placing large and frequent orders found it tedious to place orders through the standard checkout process. Ambaum worked with Fantastapack to architect a solution that involved creating a React front end application in conjuction with a Laravel framework to handle the order processing and artwork uploads from resellers. Ambaum also setup API connections to internal Fantastapack systems and integrated Ship Engine APIs to allow resellers to enter their own UPS, Fed Ex and USPS shipping rates. The custom software Ambaum created is now an integral part of Fantastapack’s operations and a valuable tool for resellers to place frequent orders.

Deep Sentinel

Posted on by Andrew Crawley

Deep Sentinel

Shopify | Ecommerce| New Site Build

The Client

Deep Sentinel is the next-gen home security solution that stops crime before it happens. Powered by a proprietary AI, HD smart cameras, and 24/7 LiveSentintel™ personal security guards, Deep Sentinel sets the new standard in home protection. Deep Sentinel protects your home and proactively stops burglary, package theft, or driveway break-in, allowing customers to feel dramatically safer at home. 

The Overview

Deep Sentinel was a new company looking to sell their proprietary home security product through an ecommerce site. This required a full site build and a custom theme created in Shopify. We had to set up purchasing to handle the initial cost for the physical product as well as a recurring subscription cost for the service that could be annual or monthly. Their store is currently active, generating sales and can be viewed here: Deep Sentinel

The Challenge

Deep Sentinel came to us as a new store looking to sell their next-gen proprietary home security solution through an ecommerce site. Being a new company selling a new-to-the-market product, they had no site and no customer base. This meant our job was to build an entire site from the ground up that would draw customers in and showcase the product to make great first impressions.

The Process

This build required us to create a custom theme in Shopify. The actual product catalog of the site is relatively simple, so the focus of the build was on design to really feature and sell the product. There was some complex configuration we had to do to set up the subscriptions for the products. Deep Sentinel has an initial cost of the physical product and then the subscription kicks in for the service. We also had to set up a monthly subscription and an annual subscription and provide customers with the ability to toggle between the two before the final purchase.

The Solution

Deep Sentinel is a subscription-based online store that is built on the Shopify platform. The site needed to be the start of building a relationship of trust with customers. That meant building a high grade site that is easy to navigate and guides customers to all the information they need. The purpose of the site is to provide customers with a more comprehensive security system that has 24/7 “Live” surveillance. The store is currently active and generating sales.

The site can be viewed here: Deep Sentinel

The Result

“Hands-down…an invaluable asset for our company. [They are] extremely knowledgeable, work is top grade, and the turn-around is amazing. I would highly recommend Ambaum for UX and back-end work in Shopify.”

Pair of Thieves

Posted on by Andrew Crawley

Pair of Thieves

Performance basics and clothing brand.

Pair of Thieves (PoT) is a diverse clothing brand with the tagline: we’re here to make all lovely humans ready for everything. Ambaum first engaged with Pair of Thieves in the summer of 2019 and we were brought in initially to fix performance issues on the site.

Ambaum took over regular maintenance work on the PoT site and quickly got started creating new custom pages, adding a new collection navigation features, as well as various minor style edits, and developing custom discount scripts for special promotions.

PoT was struggling with slow-loading pages and Ambaum kicked off a site speed diagnostic to figure out what was causing the problem. The biggest problem we found was how the theme managed color swatches for their products. PoT lists different colors of the same product as separate products, rather than variants of the same product in order to improve SEO, but this requires custom code in the theme to associate the different colored products with each other. The information has to be stored under the hood so that the theme knows what products go together, and what swatch image to display for each color. 

  • The previous code developed for managing these swatch associations was inefficient, it required looping through many large lists of data in order to pull the information needed to display the swatches under a product. This slowed download times considerably as the looping caused it to take longer to pull all of the needed information from the server.
  • We were able to improve the efficiency of the swatch code by moving some of the data out of lists that had to be looped through, into metafields which could be accessed more quickly and efficiently. Rather than having to loop through a long list of swatches until the needed one was found, we are able to instantly access the swatch by name through metafields. We also came up with more efficient ways to store the groupings of products. While some looping was still required to go through and get the data for the products, splitting things out into smaller groupings reduced the amount of looping needed. These edits provided a noticeable improvement to the loading speed of the site.

While we were able to make some improvements to the site loading speed by editing several aspects, such as swatches, to be more efficient. Some of the site speed issues were more deeply rooted in the foundational structure of the site, so in order to further improve site speed, we began a complete theme rebuild that with an eye towards efficiency and performance.

In the process of optimizing, we recommended our tech partner, Searchspring: the leading search, merchandising, and personalization platform built exclusively for eCommerce. With Searchspring’s robust reporting and insights, Pair of Thieves is able to leverage data, creating synonyms and redirects to ensure that shoppers find exactly what they want. Searchspring’s advanced filtering and sorting capabilities mean less time scrolling through results that don’t match shoppers’ needs.

This partnership resulted in 3.5x higher conversion rates from customers using the site search, and found that customers using the site search spent 3.7x more than customers who did not. Check out their full case study here.

Bulletproof

Posted on by Andrew Crawley

Bulletproof Coffee

High performance coffee and food brand.

Bulletproof is a science-based approach to nutrition and wellness that is tried, tested and proven to make your life awesome. Bulletproof Coffee approached Ambaum looking for Shopify Plus programming support for their site in Spring of 2019. The challenge for Bulletproof was to provide customers more control over their subscriptions through their Shopify Plus and Recharge integration. Ambaum provided a senior programmer for Bulletproof to help them architect and develop a custom app to give Bulletproof customers more control over their subscriptions. 

Our senior Shopify Plus developer stayed engaged with Bulletproof long after the initial project and assisted Bulletproof with moving WordPress from /blog to their core domain and then put Shopify on a subdomain (shop.bulletproof.com).  Bulletproof has integrated our senior developer into their weekly standup meetings and assists with a wide variety of both WordPress and Shopify Plus projects.

Ambaum also provided an experienced growth marketing consultant to help with SEO issues Bulletproof was experiencing. The growth consultant first performed an SEO audit that identified a number of broken links, as well as keyword and content gaps in their SEO strategy. A plan was put in place for remediation to help fix links and update any obvious errors. Bulletproof was happy with the work our growth consultant provided and was able to salvage many critical links that improved their backlink profile.