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Advanced Fiberglass Concepts
Advanced Fiberglass Concepts designs and manufactures the highest-quality fiberglass aftermarket automotive parts for off-road vehicles. This family-owned business uses only the best materials to ensure durability and proper fitment and all their manufacturing is hand-laid and done right here in the United States. In addition to selling their extensive line of products direct-to-consumer, they also do custom projects and private-label services.
Advanced Fiberglass Concepts wanted their Shopify site to be more powerful and more professional looking and have the ability to add a business-to-business portal. Owner John Gerwatosky reached out to Shopify Plus and they recommended working with Ethercycle to redesign the site.
“Finding a reliable web developer can be difficult. A lot of them, they'll talk the talk and then they don't follow through and won't finish what we need them to do. So it was kind of a relief to find Ethercycle. Shopify was the one that recommended them and I'm sure they can only recommend good qualified web developers.”
Designing and building a custom theme to improve the customer shopping experience
We worked with Advanced Fiberglass Concepts to design and build an entirely custom theme that would convey the high quality of their products and make it as easy as possible for customers to find the product they need.
During the design process, we collaborated closely with John to execute his vision for the site and made recommendations based on our extensive work with seven-, eight-, and nine-figure aftermarket automotive brands.
We know from experience that confirming vehicle fitment is the single biggest barrier to purchase for most customers. It doesn't do anyone any good for customers to browse products that don't fit their vehicle. We replaced the traditional “shop” menu with a single “shop by vehicle” button that opens a “year-make-model” vehicle picker and appears on every page. This means that within seconds of landing on the site, customers can directly go to a listing with only the products that fit their vehicle.
We created a custom product detail page template to better showcase each product and preempt pre-sale questions as much as possible. We used a sub navigation that acts as a table of contents so that customers can immediately jump to the information they’re looking for (including product details, fitment and installation information, and FAQs).
Advanced Fiberglass Concepts had an important upcoming launch for pre-orders on a new product. To reduce customer service inquiries and improve the buying experience, we customized the product detail page template so that it would clearly explain the product was a pre-order (adding a clear pre-order badge, replacing the “add to cart” button with a “pre-order now” button, and prominently featuring information on the estimated ship date).
“We're starting to offer those services more. It was really important to make a strong services page to show off our services and better market them to our client base.”
Rather than the traditional single-column wall-of-text-only pages employed by other ecommerce sites, we created a custom service page layout that acts as a multimedia brochure, featuring videos showing their services in action. We again used a sub navigation menu to help potential clients jump to the service they’re interested in.
John says he very much appreciated the close collaboration and how easy we were to work with throughout and the resulting redesign we were able to achieve together.
“They took the vision in my head and put it on the website and gave good recommendations. We’ve used the website as the basis to redesign our marketing templates, so our entire email campaign, our SMS campaign, and our social media marketing follow the same style as well.
I'm a perfectionist when it comes to this stuff. I like getting into the fine detail and their team was really helpful going back and forth throughout the process. I could just text or email and then they'd take care of all the changes that I needed or wanted. I also like how they just charge one flat fee for the entire project, so you don't have to go through the project and go, ‘Oh, I made four changes, I don't know what that’s going to cost.”
We helped improve the site’s functionality as we built the theme, working with app vendors to troubleshoot and resolve some nagging issues that had persisted in previous site builds.
To make content management as easy as possible, we implemented Shopify's new Online Store 2.0 metafield system so that custom fields on their product detail pages (such as install instructions) can easily be edited by anyone with no code knowledge at all. The use of sections on their services page will also make it easy for the Advanced Fiberglass Concepts team to make edits should their services change in the future.
A successful product launch, helping customers shop with confidence, and more efficient customer communication
The redesigned website launched about a month before Advanced Fiberglass Concepts had a major product launch — opening pre-sales for their 2021-2022 Ford Bronco replacement hardtop (pricing starts at $5,250).
The product launch was very successful. Advanced Fiberglass Concepts did a lot of work in the lead up to the launch — with months of work engineering a superior product, creating high-quality renders to showcase on the site, and marketing the product through social media and niche forums to reach a targeted audience. John said the redesigned website we delivered supported those efforts by helping customers purchase with confidence.
“The website was really important for this product launch, which was our most important product launch to date. Having a well-designed, professional-looking website means customers feel more comfortable purchasing from our well-established brand.”
Beyond contributing to the success of the product launch, John says the work Ethercycle did has also helped reduce time managing communication with customers. We added forms to the site to streamline communications, including a “request products” form, a “submit builds” form (allowing customers to share photos and details about their Advanced Fiberglass Concepts equipped rigs), and a new dealer application.
“Instead of customers just bombarding us with Instagram messages, Facebook messages, or emails that are all unorganized, those forms are each tied to a separate email inbox, so we can collect all the information from customers directly from there. It’s a lot easier now.”
John was so pleased with our work together, that he’s looking to work with Ethercycle in the future on projects such as adding a business-to-business portal to the store and new automation through Shopify Flow.
“Ethercycle did a fantastic job from start to finish and it was easy to work with them. Normally I have feedback to give to companies on things that could be improved and I honestly don't have any to give to Ethercycle. I'll definitely return back for future projects.”
Our Work Together
Ethercycle helped Advanced Fiberglass Concepts:
- Improve the design and functionality of their site, better reflecting the high-quality of their products and services
- Improve the shopping experience — removing barriers to purchase and preempting pre-sale questions and helping customers more quickly find what they need
- Reduce time spent managing customer communications
- Successfully launch pre-orders for a new product (their most important product launch to date)