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- Shopify website development
- Performance marketing
Arrow Gift Co. (Arrow) is an independent retailer of greeting cards and other gifting products. We’ve previously detailed how we worked with the brand to deliver a full brand uplift and give them the platform for which their eCommerce channels could flourish.
Before working with us, Arrow’s primary eCommerce channel was the online marketplace Etsy. Despite having a Shopify site, due to fewer sales, Arrow had not seen reason to focus their time on developing it.
The promises of an owned eCommerce store, like Shopify, are grander than those of marketplaces like Etsy or Amazon. Not only do they allow users to earn a higher percentage of the sales they make, but you enable a much richer shopping experience. This, of course, requires a significant amount of work and knowledge of eCommerce best practice. So following the delivery of Arrow’s brand uplift, we began working on building them a robust eCommerce store, that would improve the brand’s visibility, status within their industry, and bring in more sales.
The Challenge
Whilst Arrow were not planning to abandon their Etsy store, the primary challenge was to build an eCommerce storefront that could eventually overtake their Etsy store in terms of sales. Arrow already had a Shopify store in place, and from this, we could see where the major challenges in actually delivering the NEW store would lie.
The primary challenge was translating the newly established visual style into the eCommerce landscape. Etsy is a brilliant tool for independent brands, but in order for each brand to have a chance to stand out, the visual style of the website itself acts as a blank canvas. Therefore, the newly built Arrow site had to have a unique and recognisable visual identity, in order for customers to realistically choose it over simply shopping on Etsy as they had done previously.
Secondly, the personalisation. One of the major selling points of Arrow’s products is their ability to be personalised to a customer’s liking. Even on Etsy, achieving this is a bit unintuitive, with a customer having to give a full description of their desired personalisations within one textbox. On Shopify, Arrow had been using a third party app to get answers to all of their personalisation options. As this app had not been built with Arrow in mind, not only was it not perfectly fulfilling their needs, but it was clunky for both them and the customers to use. We knew that building a more robust version of this functionality was key.
- UI design
- UX design
- Custom functionality
- Search engine optimisation
- Google ads management
- Meta ads management
- CRM & email marketing management
The Solution
Whilst we were extremely pleased with the visual identity we had established for Arrow, when we first translated it into Shopify, we immediately realised that we would have to reign things back. Because Arrow’s products are so visually striking, in order for them to pop against the rest of the site, the colour palettes that surrounded them needed to be more muted. Those more vibrant elements are still present, just to a lesser degree than was initially planned. In spite of this, the new site is still much more vibrant than their Etsy store and would give Arrow customers the branded experience they were looking for.
Third party apps certainly have their place on eCommerce sites. Some functionalities they provide are so ubiquitous, such as a subscription offering, that implementing a custom option is simply not worth the time, or effort required. However, they should only be implemented sparsely and any opportunity to use Shopify’s native functionalities over a third party option is an opportunity that should be taken. This was our opinion of the third party app Arrow had been using for getting their personalisation information.
Our solution was to build each personalisation drop down, such as a request for a name, number, or message, as a meta object within Shopify. Arrow could then assign the associated meta objects to the products that required them in Shopify, massively simplifying the process for both them and the customer in the long run.
Finally, there were a number of other opportunities available to Arrow with their new eCommerce store. These included the customer brand communications available through Klaviyo, opportunities to boost the site’s visibility on Google with robust SEO work, and the ability to pair products together for easy upsells, all of which has been key to the new site seeing success.
The Outcome
With all of the work completed Arrow’s new site has given the brand all of the benefits that an owned eCommerce platform promises.
As their eCommerce partner, it’s been a joy to watch the site grow. The first month of the new website and branding saw revenue double the previous websites record month. In fact, since its launch in April of 2024, sales have grown month-on-month, every month!
Equally the marketing across Google ads, Meta ads, and SEO, has seen consistent growth amongst both first time and returning customers - a testament to the ease of using the website and to Arrow’s product quality.
If you’d like to learn how we can build an industry leading Shopify site for your business, contact us!
Every great relationship starts with a conversation. We’d love to talk with you about your next project and answer any questions you might have about Shopify. But be warned… once we get talking about this stuff, it’s hard to shut us up!
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