Your Ecommerce Web Channel Growth is Plateauing…And This is Probably Why

February 15, 2022

6206cdc1d39526d7c2aa5703 Your Ecommerce Web Channel Growth is Plateauing…And This is Probably Why web channel growth

At Shogun, we get to talk to incredible, rapidly-scaling brands daily and there are some key trends we’re noticing about the ecommerce landscape we want to share.

In this post, we’ll look into the crystal ball at the big problem your multi-channel brand may be facing, but before looking ahead, we need to look back into the past…to Bezos-era shopping. 

Bezos-era convenience…at the cost of quality

In the earliest days, ecommerce was about convenience.

That was the be-all-end-all, really.

Amazon can help your brand ship products to happy shoppers in a single day(!) And as little as five years ago, this was groundbreaking. We take it for granted now, but marketplace convenience changed the game for shopper expectations and how online-first brands needed to compete. But, eventually, a shadow side of this convenience emerged.

In time, marketplaces dehumanized purchases, and—most important to today’s landscape—Amazoncompletelychanged how shoppers discern product quality.

Who among us hasn’t been burned by eroding product quality? Amazon and third-party sellers have inadvertently made everyone extra wary of all the subtle indicators a marketplace product may be junk. And shoppers have since adapted, becoming that much more perceptive or careful.

Amazon product page
In a sea of side-by-side products, shoppers needed to change the way they perceive quality.

Consumers came to learn it’s a total gamble with purchase experience and satisfaction when you prize convenience alone.

And considering that monthly, more than 197 million people globally visit Amazon—it’s safe to say that many of your customers learn their shopping habits here. But, as I’ll get into, habits have already been shifting, and your brand has needed to evolve too.

Brand identity has become a stand-in for quality…

As a kind of direct, whiplash reaction to eroding product quality, we’ve seen the rise of conscious consumerism—or people spending their discretionary income connected to ethics and identity.

In other words, what a given purchase says about you.

And this has had huge implications for how brands have needed to operate.

Even more than a convenient buy, shoppers have developed entirely new ways to perceive quality. And this is the big change successful brands have tapped as their competitive advantage.

It’s no secret that customers now care about a company’s ethos, origin story, ethical business practices, and more. They want to feel (and see) that intangible “bougie”-brand status to confirm a satisfying buy. They need to encounter several confirmations that you’re a worthwhile brand at every touchpoint.

Everlane's transparent factories
Brands like Everlane have mastered telling a more all-encompassing story.

The big takeaway here is that: A company’sability to convey both exceptional product quality and an exciting brand identity through a multi-channel experience has become paramount.

Perfect execution of ‘brand experience’ is now table stakes 

As conscious consumerism took over, the impact it’s had is that your ecommerce or web team has needed to visually communicate an entire brand ethos, and satisfy dozens of subtle, unconscious mental checkboxes a consumer has before you’ll be successful.

No small feat.

The experiential gap in ecommerce will forever exist (you can’t hold the product in your hand before you buy). But we’re seeing that brand  experience has become a direct substitute for communicating quality. There’s a transference consumers innately understand and it happens via the experience you intentionally craft across channels.

Cult-favorite brands like Brooklinen, Briogeo Hair Care, TULA Skincare, Reformation, Everlane, and more all understand the importance of this carefully-crafted experience on their owned web channel and what it conveys.

You’ll notice that—even as these brands expand via partnerships and a growing physical retail presence—they each take full control of their owned ecommerce website experience as a core part of prestige brand building. They’re creating the opposite of Amazon-era shopping. They’re building experiences:

Brooklinen's about page
Briogeo's Don't Despair, Repair
TULA Skincare's breakout breakthrough acne toner pads
Reformation's "getting stuff done" and "the sustainability report"

These companies know that with a shopping experience your team controls, you can keep more of your margin, avoid commoditization, and get more opportunities to

create and sustain meaningful relationships with your customers (vs. only having indirect access to your audience via major retailer channels).

But among scaling brands we hear from, a key limitation has emerged.

Consumers have caught on to standard themes (and your team hates using them too)

Today’s emerging brands have huge creative visions for their site experience. Everyone wants to deliver a dynamic, personalized, functional, consistent, and highly-performant site for shoppers. But web teams and brand managers are encountering limits to creative control.

This is because the traditional ways we’ve had for building ecommerce are constricting what’s possible—especially on the frontend (everything the customer sees).

Right now, despite all the efforts of your team, templated or standard sites are:

  • Cookie-cutter/expected
    Shoppers know what the standard default themes feel like and the familiar isn’t cutting it anymore. The experience they’re seeking now (the one of the aspirational brand) is elevated, and their expectations for smoother shopping are higher than what a stale or templated site can deliver.
  • Difficult to scale
    As brands start to really grow, many begin to have a huge volume of content and simply cannot scale on a traditional ecommerce setup. We’ve seen that creating several sites for internationalization, or even multi brand experiences becomes especially cumbersome.
  • Slow loading
    A typical ecommerce site no longer meets shopper expectations for performance. The average mobile web page takes 15.3 seconds to load, (and it’s been found that every one second of delay in load time can impact mobile sales by up to 20%!)

What we know is that when scaling ecommerce web teams attempt to make changes to the frontend, things like multisite content management or hosting rich media while balancing site performance becomes a nightmare.

It’s common to find you’ve outgrown your initial ecommerce platforms. These platforms are terrific as ecommerce foundations (they help you build your backend functions to perfection), but they were never intended to operate as an advanced content management system. As multi-channel brands begin to have more advanced content needs, what worked great for SMB growth falls flat when your use case gets complex.

More scaling brands than ever want to fully own how customers experience a storefront with a flexible frontend.

You need to execute on brand experience with full creative control and performance

Thanks to advances in the landscape and technology, now you can finally create highly differentiated experiences, without tradeoffs. Put another way, you can create the Apple-esque ecommerce site experience we all want—packed with rich merchandising and dynamic interactions—all without compromising on design or speed.

You no longer need to weigh up the cost-benefit of adding high resolution video, animations, or making changes on the fly. You can exceed the limits of traditional commerce and meet the expectations of your site visitors.

Shogun Frontend is a unified frontend platform that simplifies the creation of rich, highly performant ecommerce experiences. With our software, your ecommerce team can transform your site into a high-converting experience with unparalleled speed.

Shogun Frontend
Shogun Frontend

 

Shogun Frontend becomes the ‘head’ on top of your existing Shopify or BigCommerce backend. You get all the benefits of headless commerce while keeping payments, inventory, and checkout intact. Moreover, the underlying Progressive Web App (PWA) technology means your site can deliver exceptional speed, turning browsers into buyers.

We firmly believe that both react.js and progressive web apps are the new frontier for ecommerce experiences. And we’re imagining a near-future where ecommerce marketing teams will be able to create a PWA in a low-to-no-code environment.

No need to frankenstein together the technology.
No more compromises.

Now you can focus purely on designing a no-holds barred customer experience.

Launching richer site experiences is driving growth for innovative brands

Knowing the importance of full control over their owned channel experience, brands like Daring Foods, TULA Skincare, OneBlade, Nomad Goods, Stikwood, and more all took their site experiences into their own hands in the past year with Shogun Frontend. And each is seeing extraordinary results.

Home decor brand Stikwood unlocked total creative freedom

As Steve Worth, Director of Marketing at Stikwood shared with us on the creative freedom:

Steve Worth of Stikwood

 

“With Shogun Frontend, we’re able to design a shopping experience that speaks to our product caliber and goes far beyond a carousel of images or a single video. We’re trying to tell a story about the product, and we can do that easily with Shogun Frontend. Shopify is great if you want to stay within the guardrails, but we wanted to control our guardrails”

Not only has Stikwood’s new frontend freed them from the standard themes design restrictions, but their workflow has entirely improved, too. The team can offer more dynamic shopping experiences (and launch promotions/site content in days, not weeks).

Like Stikwood, luxury shaving brand OneBlade also sought to control their owned web experience. As Josh Nash, OneBlade’s Chief Marketing Officer shares—they needed to balance creativity with performance:

Josh Nash of OneBlade

“We’re a visual brand, and we’re a luxury brand. So we really needed to allow people to immerse themselves in our design without slowing the site down…We wouldn’t have been able to feature 3D renderings of each razor model on the site without Shogun Frontend and the speed it affords us as a PWA.”

Before a flexible frontend atop Shopify, the brand was unable to include rich media on the site because of speed tradeoffs, and the developer costs. But now, OneBlade can manage and build custom pages and features quickly and easily.

OneBlade's homepage

Just three months after launch, they increased subscriber rate and average order value by a whopping 579% and 30.1% respectively. They decreased average page to page load time by 83%!

Prestige Skincare brand TULA delivered unmatched speed

Similarly, TULA Skincare had been steadily growing and craved not just total control, but also unparalleled site performance. As their CEO, Savannah Sachs puts it:

Savannah Sachs of TULA Skincare

“Rather than relying on Shopify Plus for that front-end experience, the way we have in the past, we wanted to innovate and build in-house using our digital and tech teams. Speed is incredibly important and is one of the biggest reasons we [went] headless. By building our own frontend, we can really optimize speed and the shopping experience. How quickly your website loads, and how fast your customer can navigate through it, is a huge determinant of performance.”

Their new Shogun-powered frontend sped up site load times by approximately 35%, which has impacted their conversion rate on mobile devices (85% of TULA.com’s traffic).

A flexible frontend, without the headaches

And lastly, while some brands choose to gain flexibility, control, or performance of their sites by assembling entirely custom frontends from scratch (a massive undertaking), Daring Foods chose a unified platform to achieve their recent, incredible rebrand.

Daring.com

Their rich media experience was built in record time, and helps Daring show up in the market matching the incredible word-of-mouth reputation that precedes them.

You can now exceed the limits of modern commerce

It’s clear to us at Shogun that amid ecommerce shifts, a new era of commerce is upon us.

The move from pure convenience to conscious consumerism has given rise to brand experience, and the brands who can create richer, highly-performant experiences to impart brand experience and distinction—will win.

The standard themes, or templated, restrictive sites are getting in the way of appearing as you need to. And we’re here to change that.

Here’s to the new era, and the experience you’ll create.

#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Start Building Your Store With Shogun Frontend<cta-title>Learn how Shogun Frontend can help you achieve the exact ecommerce experience you envision. Learn more

Finbarr Taylor

CTO and co-founder of Shogun.

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