When great minds think alike, success is just around the corner.
Both Bold Commerce and digital agency Inverse Paradox guide their clients through similar paths: building relationships with enterprise brands to better understand how to solve their digital problem with creative solutions, and developing innovative ecommerce assets designed to engage customers and increase conversions.
Inverse Paradox has designed and produced websites on various platforms including Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce. As CEO Neil Harner says, “WooCommerce has proven to be an incredible option for businesses with a controlled audience, such as a company looking for a B2B solution, or for brands with storytelling needs where they need the hybrid of a strong CMS and commerce for a limited portfolio of products, or for brands in a growth phase.”
Building robust quick-to-market ecommerce sites for retailers is par for the course for Inverse Paradox. To cite one example, Harner recalls how they worked collaboratively with agency partners to elevate a beauty brand’s new WooCommerce website.
The site launched two days before the brand embarked on a major TikTok campaign. “The website launched flawlessly including data migration from their old website, geolocation features and custom integrations with 3PLs,” Harner says. “Over the span of those few days prior to the campaign, we tuned the caching and environment for speed and when the campaign launched, nearly three and a half million visitors trafficked the website in less than a 24-hour period. The website didn’t flinch and performance was maintained through the entire campaign.”
Optimizing checkout and combatting cart abandonment
Leading enterprise brands that harness the power of a headless commerce architecture can capitalize on the innovation of best-in-breed vendors whose specialty apps can add customization and flexibility to any online retailer.
As Senior Product Marketing Manager at Bold Commerce, Anatolii Iakimets, notes in a recent Bold Commerce blog post: “Retailers on legacy commerce platforms want to switch to more modern platforms because they are focused on growing revenue, making changes quickly, offering a better customer experience — which they cannot accomplish easily because legacy technology is rigid and expensive to maintain.
Customer expectations are at the heart of building a frictionless checkout experience. Due to how widespread online shopping has become, customers expect smooth checkout flows where they can easily move from field to field and page to page to reach the final stage of checkout without any disruptions.
Developing a seamless checkout experience is a front-burner issue for ecommerce brands. According to the RSR report Retail eCommerce in Context: The Next Iteration, more than 80% of retailers surveyed responded that improving the online checkout experience is a priority.
Today’s omnichannel environment should encourage brands to evaluate how effective their checkout experiences become when shoppers interact with brands via various touchpoints, from social to mobile to voice search. Consistent testing, such as A/B testing, and double-checking the checkout flow from each channel will build confidence for the brand, especially if they schedule these checks as regularly as possible.
Another avenue for optimizing checkout includes engaging shoppers with discounts and coupon codes. Customers can be swayed to brands with extensive online coupon programs they find in their inbox. Strengthening email marketing campaigns are important to attract and retain customers with coupon giveaways.
Crafting these strategies and basing decisions on data all contribute to fighting the scourge of cart abandonment, when shoppers leave a retailer’s website without paying for the items in their online cart.
In 2019, the Baymard Institute analyzed several individual studies and found that the typical cart abandonment rate across the board is 69%.
They also outlined the top reasons for cart abandonment among retail customers online, such as:
But when the checkout experience is optimized, a ripple effect occurs—trust is spread across the customer base, conversions inch up, and cart abandonment rates plummet.
Harner says, “One of the areas I know that could both improve the experience for customers and improve performance is a better checkout experience. Bold’s Checkout offers the best of both worlds: the ability to have your WordPress/WooCommerce website and a checkout experience which is fast, secure and reliable. And due to this component being one of the biggest performance stressors, offloading this to Bold benefits the website as a whole.”
Inverse Paradox in action—Polidori Sausages
The pandemic upended how food manufacturers did business, either forcing restaurants to close altogether or provide takeout, while also paring down what grocery stories brought to their shelves.
For Polidori Sausage, they recognized how they needed a new sales channel to boost their support of their customer needs, whether those sausage lovers hailed from Colorado or across the US.
In order to drive a much-needed new avenue of sales to compensate for losses through the pandemic, the food brand looked to direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce utilizing WooCommerce, creating opportunity not only for recovery, but to deeper enable future growth.
When Polidori first approached Inverse Paradox to explore this opportunity, the agency ran a diagnostic on the established website to determine if Inverse Paradox could dependably inherit the website as well as assess if the theme and existing configuration was viable to extend for WooCommerce.
Paradox moved quickly to enable a WooCommerce-powered site that included Square and PayPal payment gateways. The catalog was loaded, and the theme was tweaked to include a shopping cart, my-account functions and other ancillary navigational and interface elements. Most importantly, complex rules for local delivery versus national shipping were configured to, say, establish integration with ShipStation to streamline management of fulfillment activities.
The entire process took less than 60 days including necessary validation, quality assurance and training activities to assure it was a successful deployment.
Almost immediately upon launch, the ecommerce channel began generating sales due to its established traffic and the exceptional marketing strategies across email and social media networks.
“We’re a small agency with a lot of capability and dedication to our clients,” says Harner. “All of our clients will tell you we’re dedicated and we go above and beyond for them and they feel like we’re part of their in-house team.”
- Topics:
- Partner spotlight
