Bossshotshells.com
Miva eCommerce Replatforming Development

The Client

The BOSS Shot Shell brand is what comes to mind when you picture “American-made”. Yes,  their products are designed and manufactured in the American Midwest state of Michigan. But more than that, BOSS is a small, family-owned business working one-on-one with their loyal customers, and using their own products. 

They have stuck to this approach to create a loyal and ever-growing community of hunters that take pride in the conservation approach. By building their business around that kinship with their shoppers, they have been able to produce a superior product that is ingrained with their beliefs. 

BOSS reached out to Glendale Designs because it was time to level up their website to match the high quality of their products.

The Site

Improved Usability

As with any site build, one of our main focus areas is the usability for the shopper. Before narrowing down on any other pain-point or wishlist item with the client, the Glendale team zeroes in on the front-end user experience. That was the case with Bossshotshells.com. 

The primary concern was the site speed – or the lack thereof. The old site had a nice design, but the platform struggled to keep up with high quality images and very high traffic patterns. Moving to a new platform that was able to handle a robust design meant that speed would be greatly improved without sacrificing style.

The BOSS team had plans to approximately double the number of SKUs in their product catalog after the launch of the new site. While their original catalog wasn’t huge, it was already causing speed and usability issues on the old site. There was a good chance that doubling it would render the site almost unusable. 

With the site launching on Miva instead, the platform is more than capable of handling their catalog along with high traffic, high resolution images and hearty site design. 

Moving to a new platform… meant that speed would be greatly improved without sacrificing style.

Expanded Customer Capabilities 

The new platform allows for more than just increased speed. With built in customer account features, a host of new options are available for the BOSS shopper.

Because BOSS cultivates a community as opposed to collecting one-time-purchasers, their customers benefit greatly from having unique shopper profiles. The ability to create a user account lets frequent buyers easily store their billing/payment information, and various shipping destinations (often different from the billing information as they ship to lodges, cabins, etc.). More importantly, it lets customers quickly reorder what has worked for them in the past. 

Using the order history and reorder system native to Miva, shoppers can get in and out quickly, without having to search, contact customer service, or fuss over product specifications.

Finally, the customer profiles will be easily expandable by BOSS and Glendale in the future, if the client decides to expand their community services on the site.

In addition to customer profiles, the introduction of product reviews allows users to gain valuable real-world feedback from others in the community.  With so many active community members, the in depth reviews left on the BOSS products are highly valued sources of experiences and assessments.

Backend Improvements

Before the client moved to their new platform, the existing site was attractive and mostly functional. Yes, there were speed issues, the navigation was a little confusing, the customer experience was slightly lacking. But the site was new and the design was nice. 

The real issues were behind the scenes, felt by the BOSS team. By moving the site onto Miva, the staff and owners of BOSS Shot Shells were able to experience a whole host of new capabilities that would make running the business easier than ever.

A primary concern was the difficulty of updating and changing out site images like marketing banners. For a business with specific seasonality (like hunting season), it was at least AS important for them to be able to update their banners easily as it would be for any other online shop. While it was impossible to manage on the old site, it became as easy as a click of a button once moved to Miva. 

Our developers set up the Miva admin in a way that would  make it as easy as possible for the busy staff to make those changes. Besides updating banners, they are now also able to add content to custom sections like their #BOSSMEN carousel:

The  improvements to the backend functionality came with additional benefits for the shopper as well. 

Miva’s waitlist system was implemented as an easy way for shoppers to stay informed about their favorite products. It also allows the BOSS staff to forecast production needs much more efficiently. By providing a bare minimum starting point for the product (the number of waitlisted customers), the staff will be able to more accurately gauge the popularity of the item.

For a broader scope on their product and site popularity, the team now has in depth Google Analytics tracking like Customer Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion. The introduction of advanced Google tracking to the site is able to provide the BOSS team with specific goals for growing their business. 

The Result

The new Bossshotshells.com website boasts a ton of high quality images along-side its high quality products. With much improved speed and additional capabilities on the storefront, it is now a treat for shoppers to stock up for their next outings. It’s now equally as nice for the staff of BOSS to run the business with easier site management, in-depth analytics, and all around improved usability in the admin. 

Upon launching the new site, we were gratified to see an immediate sales boom larger than their old site would have been able to handle, and has been a continuing trend since go-live. We are excited to continue our work with BOSS Shot Shells in the future to develop an even richer experience for the BOSS community.

30-Day Post Launch

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The team at Glendale Design was very professional and made the entire project very painless. Their ability to communicate and keep our team as well as their team on the same page was the key to the build. The project scope was clearly defined and organized and their project management system made it very easy to keep the entire project on track.

Zach Meyer