The Client
SeaVees is a heritage brand that makes iconic california-casual footwear for national distribution both in-store and online. The company is highly focused on delivering a best-in-class online shopping experience for mobile customers, and they invest continually in the health of their growing DTC business.
The Challenge
SeaVees has an excellent in-house technical team, and over the years, they’ve explored nearly every option to build the fastest site possible on Shopify 1.0. Even so, years of design changes had eroded site speed. SeaVees knew they were losing sales to sub-optimal performance and spending too much time fixing issues rather than planning initiatives. They needed to boost their site performance quickly and permanently, without redesigning their website from scratch.
Services
• Shopify Online Store 2.0 migration
• Site speed optimization
• Ongoing conversion rate optimization
The Results
33%
Site Speed
Improvement
66%
Increase in Mobile
Conversions
3X
Speed to
Market
How We Did It
To dramatically improve SeaVees’ site speed, we performed a full lift and shift, moving their store from Shopify Plus to Shopify’s Online Store 2.0 platform. Online Store 2.0 is designed to be lightning fast over mobile and migrating SeaVees to 2.0 created an instant 38% improvement in average page load times, shaving more than a second off of their previous average. That’s a big deal, since improving your site speed by 1 second can raise your revenue by 7%.
Says SeaVees Head of Ecommerce, Pete Hardie, “Going into this on July 6th this year, when I took a look at the backlog of work for SeaVees.com, 80% of the tasks were speed related. As of today, that list is entirely empty, which means my capacity, [P3’s] capacity, and our design team’s capacity is freed up for adding features, testing concepts, and building content-rich experiences
To complete the migration process in just 8 weeks and make it as cost-efficient as possible, we took advantage of four key time-saving features newly available to developers in Online Store 2.0:
We used 2.0’s new Github support to merge local changes with the live sales environment automatically; We used the new drag and drop “sections everywhere” functionality in the theme editor to quickly design page changes for CRO and A/B testing; We leveraged the new “custom elements” feature to reuse code across the website wherever we needed to duplicate functionality, as opposed to having to rewrite and insert the code for that functionality by hand. And we used the new developer console to conduct a faster, safer QA process
The result was a bug-free, lightning fast web experience ready to go live in about half the time a traditional platform migration takes.
To help SeaVees continue to maximize sales on their new platform, P3 performs ongoing conversion rate optimization (CRO), improving discrete page elements with the help of “sections everywhere” to further increase conversion rates and engagement. Online Store 2.0 makes it easy to design, QA, and deploy these changes, allowing SeaVees to be more agile and aggressive in improving their customer experience.
Takeaways
SeaVees is an ecommerce incumbent with a successful online business that they continue to invest in. Migrating to Shopify 2.0 allowed them to maintain their high-converting website design, while achieving a 38% performance boost that led to 66% more mobile conversions. And they achieved these improvements in about half the time a traditional migration would take.
