The nutrition marketplace saw ecommerce conversion rate go up 5.2% after approaching headless in a radically different way with Shogun Frontend.
The Feed is a nutrition and wellness marketplace with the goal of making the best products available to athletes of all kinds. Founded by Matt Johnson and Ben Kennedy—both avid outdoor sports enthusiasts—The Feed helps athletes maximize every workout.
The Feed was growing rapidly and wanted to maximize site performance and gain more flexibility with their site architecture. Despite an excellent backend setup, their team wasn't able to update content as quickly or efficiently as they needed.
They wanted to provide faster, more seamless shopping and improve time-to-market for new products.
The brand saw the potential of headless commerce and chose all-in-one Frontend Platform Shogun Frontend to power their store. The Feed was able to achieve their goals while maintaining their Shopify Plus backend, which was a crucial consideration for them.
After launching the site’s new frontend with Shogun, The Feed increased ecommerce conversion rate, revenue per visitor, pageviews per session, and shoppers now feel the impact of their near-perfect Google Lighthouse score.
The Feed’s need for speed inspired the journey into headless commerce. They wanted to build a lightning-fast experience for shoppers and efficiently update site-wide content to impact revenue—all while bypassing common monolithic site roadblocks, like:
The Feed team wanted customers to explore and checkout without delays.
The existing site clocked a Google Lighthouse score of 79. However, there was room for improvement to get the score into the 90-100 range. Marketplaces prize performance ahead of aesthetics because frictionless shopping boosts conversions.
Ben Kennedy, CTO and Co-Founder, knew that products needed to be the primary focus for success:
“As a marketplace, it’s especially important that our visitors can navigate through dozens of product pages without delay. Initial page load is important but we knew the sub-second page-to-page load time was just as critical. We always want customers to browse the catalog as efficiently as possible.”
The Feed team also found it difficult to update their store templates to precisely match their vision. Testing and vetting new products with near constant site updates was proving hard to do at scale. The brand wanted to make site-wide changes easier.
“We wanted a setup that was more modular with components and sections so we could repurpose elements across the site.”
Lastly, The Feed wanted to speed up time to market. With their existing site, new content always needed code and development resources to create. Ben and team wanted to empower more team members to create rich site content without so much code, freeing up developers for other projects.
As a lean team, The Feed didn’t want to allocate all of their dev resources to creating a completely custom headless site. So instead, they chose to go headless without a ton of vendors, or complex choices:
“We needed to strike a balance between having full code-level control, but also not having to implement and maintain a bunch of platform tooling we didn't need.”
The marketplace took their Shopify store headless, launching a new progressive web application powered by Shogun Frontend.
Now, the team can update site content without needing to create new components from scratch, breaking backend functions, or needing as much custom code.
“Shogun Frontend provides the full platform with all the connections, meaning we can use Shopify and Shogun and be done. We don’t have to use Shopify and four other tools to maintain the connections, synchronize the data, and manage content. It’s an end-to-end platform that handles everything from the Shopify backend to what the customer sees,” says Kennedy.
The Feed’s dynamic homepage features a rotating collection of products based on what’s new and noteworthy. Thanks to a decoupled frontend and Shogun’s Experience Manager, Ben and team can update content like this in seconds with reusable page components and sections. This saves the developers considerable time and allows them to focus on other priorities.
The site is now also incredibly fast-loading for shoppers.
The extra code needed for customizing site templates bogged down performance before. But thanks to The Feed’s new Shogun-powered frontend, the team now creates richer site experiences without any speed tradeoffs.
A Lighthouse audit shows a near-perfect score for the Feed.com. A First Contentful Paint of 0.6 seconds and Time to Interactive of just 1.1 seconds is exceptionally fast:
Thanks to Shogun Frontend’s underlying PWA technology, the site runs as a native application with incredible speed shoppers notice.
Following the launch of the new frontend April 14th, 2021, The Feed has increased their ecommerce conversion rate by 5.2% and the number of pageviews per session by 10.8%.
And shoppers are spending more time on the site because it’s a faster experience (The Feed’s bounce rate has decreased 4.5% since launch).
Ben and team wanted a site that could handle more traffic and rich media, all without compromising on site performance and this wasn’t possible before going headless. Now, shoppers browse more pages, discover, and purchase more products in a single session without any lag.
As Ben shares: “One thing we could never have before Shogun Frontend is near-instant sub-second pageviews on subsequent page clicks, which is really important when you have a marketplace because you're not dealing with just one primary product page and a predictable customer journey…Now, our pages per session have increased with subsequent pages being very fast-loading. That’s difficult to do if you're not on a single-page web app."
Increased time on the site has meant customers now purchase more, too. Most significantly, The Feed has increased revenue per visitor by a whopping 10.3% in the time period after implementing Shogun Frontend.
Kennedy is excited about the growth so far:
“The last thing you want with a headless platform is to end up more constrained than you were before, and that's not the case with Shogun Frontend. While Shogun Frontend provides a well-structured set of components and integrations, this is not a limited platform. You have full control over the codebase and can implement any custom apps and integrations you think up. We've been thrilled with Shogun Frontend and the balance of structure and freedom it's given us as we continue to grow."
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