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Adam’s Polishes
Based in Colorado, Adam’s Polishes sells premium automotive detailing products all over the world. Founded in 2000 by Adam Pitale, the brand has become a well-established major player in the car detailing market. They have a huge catalog of more than 2,400 products, with more than 4,400 individual SKUs.
We first worked with Adam’s Polishes to migrate their ecommerce store from Magento to Shopify in 2019, a couple years before Shopify Online Store 2.0 became available, and have continued our relationship with them over the years.
Kourtney Oglesbee, Project Manager at Adam’s Polishes, said after a few years on the same Shopify theme, they noticed a couple issues that pushed them towards doing a site update:
❌ The site was a bit slow to load.
❌ The third-party app for search worked but didn’t feel integrated and required Adam’s Polishes team members to manually index keywords.
❌ The store lacked quick-shop capabilities (the ability for customers to select a product variant to add to cart without having to click into the product detail page).
It was time to upgrade Adam’s Polishes to a Shopify Online Store 2.0 theme to resolve these issues and take the opportunity to do a refresh of the design at the same time.
Going into the project, the main concern the Adam’s Polishes team had is one that many successful merchants share when looking at doing this kind of project.
“We didn’t want any of our SEO to change because we rank so well. In doing this site update, it was key for us to make sure that there was no interference there with how Google ranks us.”
BUILDING A CUSTOM SHOPIFY ONLINE 2.0 STORE THEME
We designed and developed a new customized Online Store 2.0 theme for Adam’s Polishes.
We created a more streamlined design for the site, aiming to build on the existing foundation and deliver an updated version of the site that would still be immediately recognizable as the Adam’s Polishes customers know and love. As part of the design process, we pulled in inspiration from other exemplary ecommerce sites and used heat mapping and analytics to determine what elements to keep and what to remove.
“We gave them some example websites and kind of gave them free rein to do a site lift for us. We let them be the guiding voice. And they matched what we were looking for immediately.”
By updating to an Online Store 2.0 theme, we were able to take advantage of the latest Shopify features and first-party apps that supersede some of the third-party apps the site had been using. We implemented Shopify’s Search & Discovery app for search and Shopify's native metafields for product detail pages (for categories such as comparison products, benefits, uses, size, etc.). We also used the Shopify Theme Editor to rebuild landing pages the team had originally built using a no-code visual page builder. The advantages of using more native features and functions include easier site maintenance, reduced operating expenses, and faster site load times.
We also saw an opportunity to make it easier for customers to navigate the site by doing a reorganization of the mega menu and product collections. There was an over-granular level of detail, so we aimed to reduce the overall number of subgroups and improve the categorization and taxonomy without oversimplifying or making it too broad. We prototyped the menu in a spreadsheet and collaborated with Adam’s Polishes team members to draw upon their knowledge of the product catalog and customers to ensure we arrived at a mega menu with a useful level of categorization and detail. We added a couple top-level categories, but overall reduced the number of subcategories by 25% and the number of listings under those subcategories by a third.
To add the quick-shop functionality, we custom coded in the option for the customer to select their desired variant without leaving the page they are viewing (such as the home page or a collection page). This makes it easier for customers to add multiple items off the same page to their cart and reduces the amount of clicks required for shopping.
We implemented Shopify’s Checkout Extensibility for one-page checkout and to present in-cart cross-selling opportunities. We also implemented Rebuy to create tailored cross-sell offers on other pages. (With Rebuy's incredible versatility, it made sense to make implementing it one of the exceptions to the approach we took to favor Shopify's native features and functions over third-party solutions.)
We prevented issues with SEO by ensuring that the URLs and content for landing pages all remained the same. We also took steps to avoid any negative SEO impact from the changes we made to the mega menu categorization.
“We created this huge spreadsheet where Kurt and I would go in and cross-reference the old URLs and the new URLS, making sure that if we had an old URL, it was directing to the new URL. And vice versa, if we had to create a new one, that there was no old URL that would override it.”
DELIVERING A BETTER SHOPPING EXPERIENCE & KPI IMPROVEMENTS
We launched the rebuilt site for Adam’s Polishes in May 2024. The more efficient and user-friendly store provides a better shopping experience:
✅ It’s now easier for customers to find what they are looking for with improved navigation and a more integrated search experience that provides better results than before (without the team having to manually index terms).
✅ With the new quick-shop functionality, fewer clicks are required for customers to get the desired items into their cart.
✅ With fewer apps causing a performance drag, the site speed is faster. Comparing load times from the previous site to the new one, it’s gone from 5.5 seconds to 1.4 seconds (and now passes Google’s Core Web Vitals).
“It was worth doing this project to have our customers be able to navigate the website more easily. It was all to increase our customers' shopping experience.”
There are early indications that the improved shopping experience has had a positive impact in terms of key metrics. In the two months after site launch, Adam’s Polishes saw the following improvements over the previous two-month period:
📈 Add-to-cart rate increased by 14%
📈 Total orders also increased by 14%
📈 Sessions converted increased by 9%
There were no issues with SEO with launching the new site. In fact, ditching the no-code page builder and instead building pages using Shopify’s native features means that we’ve set Adam’s Polishes up for potential improvements in SEO performance (due to the fact that the code is cleaner and easier for Google to process than machine-generated page-builder code).
Building more native functionality has the added benefit of making the site easier for the Adam’s Polishes team to manage than when it relied on more third-party apps. It also reduces costs from not having to pay for as many apps and from their team having a greater ability to make changes to the site themselves rather than having to get us involved for support.
Kourtney says she would recommend working with Ethercycle to others.
“They're easy to work with. We can message Kurt whenever there is something to address and he'll get his team on it or he'll get on it immediately. They're really good at communicating their timelines back to us and working within the time frame that we set. We work very fast and they usually match our pace. I think they have great pricing and they've always been able to give us the results we've asked for.”
Our Work Together
Ethercycle helped Adam’s Polishes:
- Design and develop a new Online Store 2.0 theme with a refreshed look and less reliance on third-party apps, and implement it without impacting SEO performance.
- Deliver a more efficient and better shopping experience with improved search and navigation, faster load times, and quick-shop capability.
- Improve key metrics in the first two months post-launch, including add-to-cart rate (up 14%), total orders (up 14%) and sessions converted (up 9%).