oBundle Increased Revenue Per User for BigCommerce Client by 36.5%

As an agency, there’s not much oBundle doesn’t do.

From design to data import, to SEO and custom themes—they’ve worked with over 500 happy clients since 2014. What’s more, they’re experts when it comes to development & design for BigCommerce stores.

Owned and managed by Andrew Riggins, a former support engineer at BigCommerce, their team has a passion for entrepreneurship and web dev. And now they’ve found a way to deliver even better client results. As Andrew shared:

“Brands have always been able to take BigCommerce sites headless, but you’ve had to make the entire stack. As an agency owner, it wasn’t appealing to me to worry about a CDN, or putting all the pieces together with middlewear, so Shogun Frontend as a software solution caught my attention.”

With a unified frontend platform, the team at oBundle can now offer even more clients the option to go headless at a fraction of what it would cost before.

“Not all clients have a quarter of a million dollars to spend on a website build. If someone wants to go headless without Shogun, it’s exponentially more expensive. Shogun Frontend productizing the build is a game changer for us because we’re selling more builds. A unified platform is more aligned to a typical store’s budget.”

Before Becoming a Certified Agency Partner...

When oBundle’s clients scale, they often crave the flexibility to publish ultra-custom content across their site, and want to do it without any tradeoffs. They want to augment their existing BigCommerce capabilities. And while it’s entirely possible, it hasn’t always been easy.

Without a go-to software solution for creating and maintaining an exciting frontend experience, brands have needed to assemble their own frontends. A highly custom and expensive undertaking. As oBundle found:

“A lot of clients love and rely on BigCommerce for their workflows—they’re trained on it, and have folks with years of experience in-house. Up until a few years ago, it wasn’t possible to easily scale or optimize for site speed with a dedicated frontend for BigCommerce. You had to think about ripping out tons of your daily workflow and retraining your entire team. Now though, you can just swap in a new frontend and that’s it.”

To go headless before, clients needed to find an agency with enough experience with BigCommerce to custom-build an API sync between the front and backend. There are hundreds of data points for products and customers in a BigCommerce storefront, so a precise connection is critical. But Andrew knew that oBundle creating this API connection from scratch would be reinventing the wheel.

Instead, partnering with Shogun Frontend for access to the leading-edge tech changed the game:

“The fact that a headless frontend is being productized vs. having to build from square one is huge. I see it like, do you want a Telsa, or a DIY electric car kit you make yourself? Sure, they’re both electric cars, but they make different impressions. One has a lot more labor involved than the other. With software like Shogun Frontend, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel for the BigCommerce API. Also, with the starter kit we don’t have to write stuff from scratch every time.”

Now: flexible frontends and awesome results

Since summer of 2021, oBundle has taken two BigCommerce clients headless: Discount Electronics (launched July 2021), and Ice Robotics (August 2021), with a third client implementation slated for launch early January 2022.

Discount Electronics, a computer hardware retailer, has been a BigCommerce merchant for eight years, having used it to build the foundation of their online business. They wanted to take ecommerce to the next stage of growth and gain even more control.

Four months after launching their Shogun-powered frontend atop their BigCommerce backend—Obundle’s client saw impressive increases to conversion rate and revenue per user:

What’s more, the site’s first contentful paint is an incredible 1.2 seconds on desktop and 1.7 s seconds on mobile.

As Andrew says: “Our clients can’t live without the performance Shogun Frontend helps us provide. The site speed load, page load, and subsequent page load are great results. Our clients would be hard pressed to move back to things that don’t perform like that.”

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oBundle prepared Ice Robotics for an ecommerce debut

‍With their second Shogun Frontend implementation for BigCommerce client Ice Robotics, oBundle’s mission was to help the brand create a stepping stone for future ecommerce expansion.

Before, this B2B client used solely a WordPress frontend. Now, with oBundle’s help, Shogun Frontend serves up the user experience while using BigCommerce as source of truth for all product information management.
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“Because a salesperson needs to finalize Ice Robo deals, we use the cart functionality to have visitors shop for what they want, and instead of checkout or payment, visitors fill out a form as a last step for now. The migration to a faster, easier to use frontend, has set the client up for great success in the near-term future.”

Since launch in August 2021, the Ice Robotics team now has an incredibly high-performing frontend, and a powerful ecommerce system waiting in the wings for when they’re ready.

Using Shogun Frontend’s Experience Manager, oBundle created super custom category, cart, and product pages for Ice Robotics that would have been more difficult in their existing setup:

“The cart, product, and category pages in BigCommerce act as a scaffolding that you work around. It’s great, that’s the purpose of it—it’s ready to go. But when it comes to super custom pages, you still work within the scaffolding,whereas Shogun Frontend is a blank canvas. Content wise, it’s the difference between a remodel and building your own house. With a remodel you build with the existing frames and load-bearing beams. With Shogun’s CMS you have a whole new foundation and you can build on it as you see fit.”
— Andrew Riggins, Founder, oBundle

Overall, where Ice Robotic’s WordPress frontend used to take ~15 seconds to load, now they have the speed, flexibility, and “wow-factor” they want as they enter the ecommerce space. The site’s first contentful paint loads in an impressive 1.8 seconds on mobile and a blazing fast 0.6 seconds on desktop.

A perfect pairing

oBundle has always delivered incredible work, and now Shogun Frontend has allowed Andrew and team to expand their services to offer headless frontends.

“Without Shogun Frontend, I wouldn’t have considered taking our clients headless. The fact that Shogun takes care of the entire frontend stack is the most attractive part. Infrastructure is not our expertise, as we’re not a dedicated full stack agency. We do some backend work, but it’s not our full business. Having someone run that as a product gives us and the client more confidence.”

As a Certified Frontend agency taking on implementations, oBundle now also has access to world-class training, documentation, and is part of a robust headless commerce ecosystem:

“The best part of being a certified partner is the amount of attention we get from Shogun. The amount of—and quickness of—their support in Slack and Jira. Also Shogun actively reaches out, wants to co-market together. Finally, the product itself. Having a product clients want and that we are excited about. It’s cutting edge tech that has a ton of potential and backing.”

Andrew Riggins

“Without Shogun Frontend, I wouldn’t have considered taking our clients headless. The fact that Shogun takes care of the entire frontend stack is the most attractive part. Infrastructure is not our expertise, as we’re not a dedicated full stack agency. We do some backend work, but it’s not our full business. Having someone run that as a product gives us and the client more confidence.”