The challenge
A great brand with an online presence that didn't do it justice.
This brand has something going for it that no amount of ecommerce optimization can manufacture: people want the product.
It has a healthy business in regional grocery stores across the U.S., a substantial wholesale operation, and a growing national footprint that now includes Walmart. It's an established brand with great products and plenty of customers.
Online, though, there was a gap.
The ecommerce experience didn't have the same appeal as the products themselves. The Shopify storefront could be easier to navigate and shop. Product merchandising and content could do a better job of selling what's special about the food. And the site's structure and content weren't giving search engines and AI shopping tools enough to work with when customers went looking for products like these.
There were opportunities on Faire and Shop App, too. Both were established parts of the brand's ecommerce business, with considerably more potential than the brand was getting from them.
So there was no shortage of things for us to get our hands on.
What we did
We worked across the ecommerce business.
We looked at the places consumers and retail buyers encountered the brand and started improving them.
Shopify storefront
- Improved navigation and made a large product catalog easier to shop
- Reworked product and collection merchandising
- Strengthened product content so it sold the food, not just described it
- Improved site structure and content for traditional search and LLM discoverability
- Found and fixed usability issues that were making the site harder to shop than it needed to be
Shop App
- Turned an overlooked Shop presence into an actual storefront
- Improved merchandising and presentation
- Gave returning customers more to browse than a default product grid
- Treated Shop as another place to sell, rather than just a place customers track packages
Faire
- Improved wholesale product listings and merchandising
- Refined product positioning for retail buyers
- Strengthened product discoverability within the marketplace
- Helped an already-important wholesale channel produce more business
Where branding came in
Branding is a lot more than a logo.
When people hear “branding,” they often think logos, colors, and fonts. Those things matter, but they're only pieces of it.
A brand is the sum of what customers see, hear, experience, and ultimately believe about a company. Online, that includes the photography, the words, the way products are presented, how easy they are to find, and whether the whole experience feels as good as the product you're buying.
This brand didn't need us to invent a new identity. It needed its ecommerce presence to do a better job of expressing the brand it had already built.
We improved the visual presentation of the products, developed stronger and more compelling messaging, and brought more consistency to how the brand showed up across Shopify, Shop App, and Faire.
The goal was simple: make the online experience live up to the brand customers already knew and loved.
The results
Up. Up. And way up.
Four months in, online sales were up 31.9%.
Shopify sales were up 30.6%. Faire, already an important wholesale channel for the brand, was up 29.5%.
And then there was the Shop App.
Up 294.7%.
About these numbers
This is a blind case study, so we're keeping the brand name and actual sales figures private. Growth rates compare monthly sales by channel in May and August.
As with any before-and-after comparison, we can't assign every dollar of growth to one specific change, and the figures aren't adjusted for seasonality.
Shop App growth
Oh, hello, Shop App.
Shop App sales increased 294.7% from May to August.
Yes, they started small. That's part of the point.
Shop sits right there inside the Shopify ecosystem, but plenty of brands barely touch it. They may already have a storefront, but it's often little more than a logo, some default product listings, and whatever Shopify put there automatically.
We saw an opportunity.
Shop is Shopify's consumer shopping app. Customers use it to track orders, follow brands, discover products, and check out with Shop Pay. Shopify merchants can also have their own storefront inside the app.
And it's an interesting audience. People opening Shop to track an order or revisit a brand aren't exactly cold prospects. Many of them have already bought something.
We treated the Shop storefront like a storefront. We improved the presentation and merchandising and gave customers more reasons to stick around, browse, and buy.
Four months later, Shop App sales were nearly four times higher.
Not bad for a channel a lot of brands barely know they have.
What it means
Sometimes growth is hiding in plain sight.
There's always another ecommerce channel to chase, another platform to join, and another place to spend money acquiring customers.
But there's also a lot to be said for getting more out of the business you already have.
This is a major food brand with successful retail distribution, strong wholesale demand, a growing presence in national retail, and products people already want. Its ecommerce presence just wasn't keeping up.
We helped change that.
Across Shopify, Shop App, and Faire, we improved merchandising, usability, discoverability, messaging, and the way the brand presented itself to consumers and retail buyers.
Four months into the work, online sales were 31.9% higher.
And we're not done yet.