Creating an intuitive, customer-centric shopping experience in a highly technical product category

Services

  • Strategy
  • Information Architecture
  • User Experience & User Interface Design

Lancaster Archery Supply is a leading worldwide archery retailer and wholesaler that offers the largest selection in archery equipment, as well as technical expertise.


Challenges

Lancaster Archery Supply needed to modernize its eCommerce site to increase speed and performance, improve product findability and overall shopping experience, and build a strong foundation for future enhancements. Out-of-the-box solutions couldn’t accommodate Lancaster Archery’s extensive and technically complex catalog with varying data structure requirements. The company turned to eHouse Studio to develop a customized Shopify Plus site for D2C and B2B, as well as other customizations needed to bring it all together. 

Solution

eHouse Studio applied its deep expertise in IA and UX/UI to design an intuitive shopping experience for technical products and accessories. In addition, eHouse migrated the sites from Magento to Shopify Plus, giving Lancaster Archery Supply more control, flexibility, and scalability. This improved the experience both for customers and for the marketing and merchandising teams that would be able to easily update marketing and product content without needing a developer. 

Information architecture redesign

Most of Lancaster’s customers are extremely knowledgeable about archery products and accessories. When redesigning the site’s information architecture (IA), eHouse Studio avoided making assumptions about what customers did and didn’t know and how they shopped. We did a lot of listening and incorporated what we heard from the client, as well as findings from competitive research. We then applied our expertise to translate this information into an effective navigation experience.  

Guided shopping experiences

To keep customers from feeling overwhelmed by Lancaster Archery Supply’s extensive product catalog, we implemented a cascading menu to take customers through decisions one step at a time. Customers browse first by category and then subcategory, allowing them to easily and intuitively narrow the scope of their selection versus navigating the full menu (For example: Bows > Compound Bows > Target Compound Bows). 


We designed the navigation menu to allow for marketing messages and product photos to showcase new products and enhance understanding of what types of products could be found in each category. 

In addition, we designed top-level product landing pages to function similarly, showcasing subcategories with product imagery for easier product findability. 


Overall, we focused on making technical information clear to help customers quickly find what they want and ensure compatibility with other products. 

Solution for Shopify’s variant limit 

Lancaster Archery Supply’s catalog included a handful of products that exceeded Shopify’s 100 variant and three variant group limit. To address this, eHouse Studio created a Shopify-native solution that was fully integrated with the ERP and synched inventory tracking. The solution enabled Lancaster to add and manage as many new products and variants (e.g., more complex product structures including variants exceeding the limit, bundles, customizable products, and custom add-ons) as needed.

Smart on-site search optimization  

Robust on-site search was critical for increasing conversions of Lancaster Archery Supply’s highly knowledgeable customers. To help customers find products faster, eHouse Studio integrated Searchspring to enable smart recommendations in the search bar – including suggested terms and product images – that appear as the user types. 


Integrating Searchspring also gave the Lancaster team more granular control over merchandising, allowing them to customize their collection pages with rules-based controls to feature products in a specific order.

In addition, we ensured that search results pages could be easily filtered by various specifications as well as auto-suggest search suggestions to help customers more quickly zero in on what they want.

Tiered pricing functionality

Lancaster Archery Supply offers tiered pricing levels for both D2C and B2B customers. To personalize the shopping experience on both the D2C and B2B eCommerce sites (i.e., automatically show tier-specific discounted pricing), eHouse Studio customized the logged-in experience and worked closely with our partners at Searchspring to ensure pricing consistency across all product detail pages and collection pages.

Super-charged gift-with-purchase 

Lancaster Archery Supply wanted ultimate flexibility when it came to gift-with-purchase (GWP) promotions, so eHouse Studio implemented a robust GWP system to enable Lancaster to run any GWP promotion under the sun – without needing a developer. 

Flexible product bundling

Lancaster Archery Supply has many products that are distinct SKUs but are always sold together (e.g., a scope and a lens). To accommodate this complexity on the fulfillment side while making the front-end experience seamless for the customer, eHouse Studio integrated a third-party app to enable bundling of any combination of products. 


Results

The new site was game-changing for Lancaster Archery Supply’s online business, with significant increases in site speed and average order value (AOV) and a huge drop off in bounce rates. In addition, the company was able to shift its focus (and budget) from maintenance of performance issues to planning site enhancements to support its business strategy.

Site Speed

39%

improvement in page load times

Page Bounce

30%

overall improvement on page bounce rate

Page Value

19%

increase in overall page value

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