Spiceology

Overview

Spiceology sells a variety of spices, herbs, and their custom blends. This chef-owned company is known for their quality and freshness, and is loved by both chefs and home cooks. They wanted to be able to sell to individuals and also restaurants and chefs at a wholesale price.

In order to achieve B2C and B2B customer groups and pricing, we recommended they move to BigCommerce. They also wanted to be able to feature unique content such as recipes, so we decided on a WordPress Headless BigCommerce shopping cart.

Problem

screenshot of Spiceology's headless BigCommerce setup

In this complex project, the client wanted to move platforms from Shopify to BigCommerce, but they also wanted to have the customization capabilities that WordPress provides. The project involved building a website that used headless BigCommerce with WordPress using the BigCommerce for WordPress plugin.

Headless BigCommerce essentially means BigCommerce would be the brains of the ecommerce portion but the front-end would be built on WordPress. The BigCommerce for WordPress plugin is still being actively worked on and improved upon by the BigCommerce team, so it served as a great starting point for us as it already has some of the basic functionality built into the plugin. One of the biggest challenges we faced was that the client had a really tight deadline that they wanted us to achieve.

Solution

In order to finish on time, the designs were worked on simultaneously with the development of the website. They picked headless BigCommerce over other platforms primarily because of the customization capabilities but also that it had similar and powerful ecommerce capabilities that Shopify had, so the transition for their team wouldn’t mean gaining the free reign of customization but having to forfeit the ecommerce features.

The variety of integrations required for this project demanded timely communication and coordination from Coalition’s end. Almost every template is highly customized, another positive in going with the BigCommerce platform. Our data migration from Shopify to BigCommerce included 56,000 customers, 44,000 orders, and 405 products. The redirect strategy from their previous platform, Shopify, included 1,000 URLs.

Through our work, we created new pages, templates, and section widgets for both BigCommerce and WordPress. We also created and maintained forms for general and limited time specialty use. We provided assistance in site speed and general site maintenance through the flex account that Spiceology set up with us.

screenshot of lines of code for Spiceology's customized templates

A few of the reasons why switching to the BigCommerce platform
worked out for this client includes their:

Flexibility

The ability to craft a headless connection with their existing WordPress CMS set up meant that we could keep their established building and product flow while leveraging BigCommerce’s CDN and eCommerce features. This is unique to BigCommece and a major selling point when it came to deciding which platform would be best for this B2C and B2B business.

APIs

Because of the headless set up, we have had to do some custom work to ensure that our integrations worked; BigCommerce’s APIs have been essential to ensuring these connections can be built and maintained.

Apps

Spiceology utilizes a wide swath of compatible apps, such as the following: A/B Tasty, Bolt Checkout, FlavorCloud, Fast Simon Search, Hubspot, Klaviyo, Smile.io, and Stamped.io. All of the apps contributed to making this website exactly what the client was looking for.

The client is pleased with our work and continues to use CT
for ongoing integrations and website updates.

A/B Tasty allowed us to implement and set up multiple popups and tags.

Bolt Checkout improves the checkout process, not only saving the customer time, but protecting the business against fraud. It also drives repeat purchases, is optimized for mobile checkouts, and overall offers customers a smooth checkout experience.

FlavorCloud makes international shipping easy and affordable, allowing Spiceology to ship wherever their customers are.

Fast Simon Search allows customers to easily search through inventory to find exactly what they are looking for – which makes them more likely to purchase.

Smile.io is a rewards program that incentivizes customers to return and make further purchases.

Stamped.io allows Spiceology to display reviews of their products directly on their site. This provides more customer engagement and is shown to increase customer purchases.

HubSpot allows customer and order data to be synced on the backend. This allows Spiceology to be able to gain valuable insights into their customers’ purchasing patterns.

Klaviyo is an email marketing tool that engages customers and delivers personalized experiences to build lasting relationships.

Final Product

Browse through the images below to see our work.

Results

In the year before launching the new site, Spiceology received 756,346 users with 1,246,804 sessions and had a bounce rate of 28.37%. In the year after their launch, they received 1,407,211 users for a total of 2,090,881 sessions and a bounce rate of only 7.33%. That is an 86% increase in users with a 68% increase in the number of sessions.

For their ecommerce results, Spiceology saw $1,326,318 in revenue from 20,048 transactions in the year before launching. In the year after the launch, they saw $4,422,314 in revenue from 67,929 transactions. That is a 233% increase in revenue and a 239% increase in the number of transactions in only a year’s time.

$4,422,314

revenue generated a year after launch

233%

revenue increase

$4,422,314 in revenue from 67,929 transactions.

68%

increase in number of sessions

2,090,881 sessions from 1,246,804.