Alpacka Raft makes packrafts in Mancos, Colorado. Their Made in USA rafts are widely recognized for their innovation and durability; so they’re used by rafting professionals and companies like National Geographic.
They approached us due to our track record of creating highly customizable websites for ecommerce companies. Naturally, they wanted their website’s design and technical capabilities to align with the high-end products that they offer and we were excited to get them there.
The Issues
WordPress Ecommerce
They had grown their ecommerce business on a customized WooCommerce implementation that was becoming difficult to maintain for both development and content management teams.
For example, sales tax had to be manually input, managed, and updated whenever the State, Cities, or Districts of Colorado changed their sales tax rates.
User Experience
The overall experience was harder to navigate and find products on, had basic search functionality, and no way for customers to get immediate help from customer service.
It was also slower to load. The page speed was 6.58-9.35s, depending on what page a user was on. We know that shoppers expect a fast shopping experience and speed = revenue. So this was critical to fix.
53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.
We also discovered that the website also didn’t pass ADA compliance testing; making it harder (or potentially impossible) to navigate for some users.
Our Solutions
WordPress to Headless Shopify Ecommerce Migration
After architecting the migration of product and shop data from WordPress to Shopify, we custom designed the website and performed the data migration.
We designed and developed this website using ReactJS, Prismic CMS, Amazon Web Services, and Shopify’s APIs. We’re proud to say this custom design is unique in the Shopify ecommerce space. We also built it so that Alpacka Raft can easily expand it as much as they need to match their projected growth goals.
User Experience
We custom developed their search using Algolia, a highly customizable API based search engine. It empowers Alpacka Raft to manage their autocompleted results, set up search synonyms, pin items to the top of search results, manage typos, and more – without needing developers once it’s integrated.
To improve customer satisfaction and communication turnaround, we set up Zendesk for online chats and support tickets.
We made sure the design would pass ADA compliance (ie: contrast, font sizes, image overlays, etc.) before we built it. Then we re-tested it during the build process and before launch to ensure a good browsing experience for everyone.
The Results
Our work has helped Alpacka Raft reduce time spent on administration tasks, enable more content management internally, increase customer satisfaction, and improve the website speed by 72%.
About Us
AWS & Shopify Partners
As members of the Amazon Web Services Partner Network, we have access to exclusive AWS technical training. So we’re well versed in AWS tools, architecture, features, and scalability. Using AWS helps us achieve our goal of being readily able to support and respond to Alpacka Raft’s growing needs.
In addition, as registered Shopify Partners, we’re familiar with the Shopify APIs available to pull the data we need to build these custom ReactJS apps. So we also worked with the Shopify API on this project to achieve Alpacka Raft’s goals.
Denver eCommerce Development
An eCommerce site needs constant attention and a team that’s available at a moment’s notice. We know it’s important to keep things like: conversion rates, average order value, website speed, backups, and event tracking on your radar. These are the types of things we do for Alpacka Raft and we’d be happy to do them for you too. Let’s talk about your eCommerce website and see how we can help make you more successful.
