Learn how to build a performant and scalable website for food service to handle 10K+ daily buyers, using e-commerce best practices and modern technology

Building a Scalable and Performant Website to Serve 10K+ Buyers of Organic Goods

FOOD SERVICE | SHOPIFY PLUS

The customer turned to Amitech to optimize the website for organic product distribution, facilitating sales, increasing brand awareness, and improving buyer satisfaction.

The customer

The customer is a US-based distributor of organic products and cookware. Founded in 2012, the company has built a strong community of 5+ million social media followers, promoting healthy eating habits.

The need

The customer developed a Shopify Plus–based website to sell products online and share recipes. With the customer’s brand gaining popularity, the number of website visits was growing exponentially, reaching 10,000+ users and 1000+ orders daily. Due to the limitations in the existing Liquid framework, the website could no longer sustain the load. On top of that, adding new functionality would lead to severe performance issues. In addition, the website was hard to customize, personalize, and it lacked robust content management.

Intending to retain current buyers and scale, the customer decided to migrate to a modern technology stack (the Hydrogen framework). Relying on Amitech, the retailer sought professional e-commerce advice, profound Shopify expertise, and UI/UX knowledge.

The challenges

The Liquid framework included core business logic for managing users, orders, etc., and it was tightly coupled with the Shopify back end. For example, to migrate the user authorization logic to the new framework, it was crucial to synchronize all data across the two systems.

Some third-party integrations lacked APIs, which hampered smooth data transition.

The website featured the recurring order functionality. When a user reordered items, the website hit a timeout, which might affect the user experience.

The solution

For greater scalability, performance, storefront flexibility, and advanced integrations, experts at Amitech suggested going headless, migrating to the Hydrogen framework. After analyzing the existing architecture, the team outlined the plan for a smooth business logic transition. First, the engineers delivered a custom user authentication logic, enabling single sign-on across multiple systems. Additionally, to avoid compatibility issues with third-party apps, the developers transformed incoming data into a readable HTML format.

The UI/UX experts at Amitech introduced a brand-new website design to make it aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, and easy to navigate.

Enter some The team then optimized the recurring order module by rewriting the code following React.js best practices. This reduced page load speed to a millisecond without causing any UX issues.

The engineers also implemented a filtering mechanism to easily choose products with preferred configurable options in a single place without the need to browse through each product.

For content management and personalization, the developers integrated Builder.io to handle volumes of diverse media (e.g., recipes, product descriptions, and images). The tool also helps to organize pages, optimize and consolidate the structure, and manage metadata (page titles, descriptions, etc.) to improve ranking and indexing.

The team introduced a cross-selling/upselling functionality that allowed end users to see recommended products based on item compatibility and purchase history. Finally, integrations with marketing automation and customer service software allowed to streamline routine tasks, such as e-mail distribution, customer review collection, etc....

The outcome

Relying on full-cycle e-commerce expertise at Amitech, the customer delivered a functional and modern website based on a modern technology stack in just a month.