We call these foundations for two reasons: first, because we love a good house metaphor (talk to us for any length of time and you’ll learn this) and second, because like the foundation of a building, so much rests on getting the setup right. Before we think about customer acquisition, before we look to optimize for customer lifetime value, or start testing offers—you get the idea—before we do any of that, ensuring that the underpinnings of your business are solid, secure, and set up correctly allows us to build and iterate with confidence.
Migrations & Store Setup
With over a decade of experience building new stores and migrating existing ones to Shopify, we can reduce the risk of platform migration. Yes, Shopify is famously customer-friendly, but no, you do not need to spend your limited time on this earth figuring out how to migrate one of the most important aspects of your business across data platforms. We’ve done it quite literally hundreds of times. Relying on our expertise allows you to focus on the future instead of making sure that customer order history is preserved (and, for instance, ensuring that importing orders does not trigger, say, 10,000 review requests to your former customers).
Similarly, despite the ease of use, we believe there are right and wrong ways to set up a store on Shopify. Whether it’s which app to use for a stockist page or how to make the most effective use of OS2 templates while controlling the number of places you might need to make an update, we have strong opinions on, well, everything actually—but especially the most effective and efficient ways to build ecommerce stores.
Site Structure & Content Strategy
Here’s where things get kind of fun. We get weirdly into product tagging and metadata structuring (truly, you can’t take us anywhere). But good data allows for good product categorization, making full use of Shopify’s automated collection model. Understanding where data goes makes the management of said data smooth and pleasant instead of rough. Similarly, thinking about site content and where it should go, from both a user and an SEO perspective, allows for the kind of growth the companies we partner with are seeking.
Ecommerce User Experience & Design
Fundamentally, ecommerce websites should follow the rules. If you’ve ever tried to shop at a weird grocery store where you can’t find the milk for some unknown reason, you can empathize with this. The milk should be on the back left—that’s where it belongs, and the cart should be on the top right—because that’s where your shoppers are looking for it. But that doesn’t mean it has to be boring. We have worked hard over many years to craft beautiful, performant, and brand-focused ecommerce websites that follow best practices for UX/UI. And we know those forwards, backwards, up, and down—in part, so you don’t have to.
Shopify Theme Optimization
What does it mean to optimize your Shopify theme? We wouldn’t be good consultants if we didn’t say, “it depends!” In some cases, it might mean ditching the old and busted for the new hotness, ensuring that you can utilize all of the new features Shopify has baked into the platform in the last two years. Time also builds up in the form of extraneous code from once-tried apps, the weird custom thing you tried a couple of years back—the cruft, if you will. If your theme hasn’t been fully updated in the last two years, optimization really means replacement.
We hear over and over that our customers don't “want a store that looks like Shopify,” and what that means to us is that nobody has ever taken the time or had the experience to make a theme truly serve their brand. That can be as elemental as bringing in brand fonts to override default type, ensuring that micro-interactions fit your brand, or overriding default options to bring in patterns. It can also involve adding code to address the fact that, for some reason, some themes don’t ship with proper heading structures in some of their templates. We’re not getting crazy here, but again, making sure that whatever we are building, we’re starting solid and true.
Shopify Analytics & Ecommerce Data Reporting
Have you ever run ads and thought, “well, that was a bunch of money and… maybe something happened”? You and just about everyone else. But that’s no way to live.
You can’t improve what you can’t measure, so we approach analytics and data setup as a foundational step. Ensuring that tags are firing, not duplicated, and properly matched—setting up CAPI for Meta, testing attribution—all the boring, unsexy, but essential plumbing that allows us to track, measure, and account for progress is just about as important as anything else. Is there more to it than that? Assuredly! Would we go on at length on the subject? Oh, you betcha! Would that be good sales copy? Likely not. But ask. We can talk about mixed media modeling, last-click attribution, MER vs. NCAC—don’t get us started!
Shopify POS Implementation
Every system has its quirks, and Shopify POS is no exception. But in the last six years of implementing it for our clients, we’ve learned a thing or two the hard way so you can just take the easy way. Things like what fits on a product label if you use the Dymo printer that integrates the best, the right way to set up backup workflows, or the simplest way to build PO imports. Our POS implementation takes something that would be annoying and slow to figure out on your own and makes it simple and swift. We’ll figure it out so you don’t have to.
