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The Contract Shop
+66.3%
YOY increase in conversion rate for BFCM sale
+123%
YOY increase in conversion rate for November
+19%
YOY increase in monthly revenue for November
The Contract Shop® creates and sells legal templates and courses tailored for creative entrepreneurs, online course creators, consultants, and coaches. Lawyer-turned-creative Christina Scalera founded the business to help customers build a strong and trustworthy legal foundation for their businesses.
After three years of using a Shopify template for The Contract Shop®’s entirely digital goods store, Christina says the website began to feel out-of-step with how the brand was evolving. Using a template meant the site ended up looking like a lot of other Shopify stores and lacked the elevated experience of a custom-designed Shopify site.
“Our customer base includes a lot of graphic designers and website designers — they want to feel that extra professional touch.
We are also the brand that people emulate a lot, so we wanted something that would be difficult to copy. Anybody can throw up a site selling contract templates and use the Shopify template, but not everybody can afford custom design and development.”
The Contract Shop®’s designer did a brand update (giving it a fresher and more gender-neutral vibe) and mocked up redesigns for several key pages on their website. The redesigns included a new custom layout with features to improve the customer experience such as a much more prominent search bar within a minimal header.
Christina and her team reached out to a few development agencies, including Ethercycle, about building a custom Shopify theme to execute the redesign. We had worked with The Contract Shop® before, so Christina knew we would use our deep specialization in Shopify and commitment to providing excellent results to deliver the best quality work. Her main hesitation about hiring Ethercycle was the higher project price.
“Ethercycle was significantly more expensive than any other firm out there. However, we wanted this done before Black Friday and I wasn't confident that we would have good communication and the project finished in time if we had gone with anybody else.
I knew that Ethercycle’s work would be top-notch and that they would make sure that the site was functioning perfectly when it came to launch day. They’re also so great at communicating quickly that I knew we wouldn't be left hanging or wondering where things were.”
Executing the elevated design with a new custom Shopify theme that performs as well as it looks
We built a new custom Shopify theme for The Contract Shop® to bring their design to life. As Ethercycle’s Developer-Designer Tom Siodlak built out each of the site pages, he was meticulous in matching each design element.
With designs provided only for the desktop version of the website, Tom designed the mobile experience for each of the site’s pages as he built them, making adaptations to optimize for conversions while staying true to the design.
Christina was impressed at how well we were able to execute the design without compromising on any of the graphic elements they wanted.
“Our finished site looks like the Photoshop files, which is pretty remarkable. They were able to incorporate all of the design and make it mobile-friendly and adaptive. That’s no small feat.“
We made it easy for The Contract Shop®’s team to manage their own site after it was launched. All the pages are customizable so the team can easily make changes to them as needed. We also created a duplicatable template with a variety of different types of sections and provided a training video on how to use it to build a new page.
Christina says she got a lot of value out of how well we managed the project and communicated proactively. We asked for everything that we needed from The Contract Shop® at the very start of the project and submitted pages for review and feedback as we built them to keep the project moving. We also provided weekly progress updates every Friday to The Contract Shop®’s COO Nicole Boucher.
“I really can't understate how valuable it was to have their communication be so efficient and effective. As a small business, I pay people to handle these communications on my behalf. Nicole’s time is literally money to me and it could have been a real waste of time if she had to do a lot of that back and forth. Instead, it seemed like it didn't really take much away from her day-to-day activities.”
A smooth launch, a record-setting BFCM sale and higher conversion rates
As a result of our work together, The Contract Shop® launched the site in mid-November 2021, ahead of Black Friday and without any issue. The new site makes it much easier for customers to find and access what they're looking for.
Launching the new site had an immediate impact with a record-setting BFCM sale and a huge increase in the conversion rate over previous years:
- BFCM 2019 sale: 3.33%
- BFCM 2020 sale: 3.06%
- BFCM 2021 sale: 5.09% (an increase of 66.3% over the previous year!)
The success of the sale helped drive November’s revenue to over $112,800 (+19% over the previous year).
The Contract Shop® also has seen results outside of the sale period. Christina says they used to strive for 1-2% overall conversion rate, but have been steadily seeing conversion rates of about 3% in the first couple of months since launching.
”All that traffic we're generating is not in vain as much. It used to be a little bit more people slipping through the cracks and we're just capturing a few more of those purchases, which makes a difference when you're a small business.”
Christina says one of the things that stood out about working with us compared to others she’s worked with was our professionalism throughout the project and that we deeply cared about her business. She appreciated how seriously we took her investment in this project, which was a significant one for her.
“I really can't stress how much I thought about going with a different agency, just because of the cost. I asked myself, ‘Is this going to give me an ROI? Is it really worth this much? Can't we just stick with this template for a while?’
I’m confident if we had gone with anybody else, the site would not have been live in time for Black Friday and probably would have dragged into the new year. That not only would hurt us financially by costing us that increase in conversion rate, but also would hurt me emotionally as the CEO, draining my energy and taking it away from new projects that are bringing in income.”
Our Work Together
Ethercycle helped The Contract Shop®:
- Create a custom Shopify site that delivers an improved customer experience and performs as well as it looks
- Launch the new site in time for Black Friday and capture more revenue with a record-breaking conversion rate for their BFCM sale (an increase of 66.3% over the previous year)
- Increase overall conversion rates from 1-2% to 3%
“I know that Ethercycle is more expensive than other development agencies, but I can tell you from experience that if you don't hire them upfront, you're going to regret it. There's no one that's going to do a better job in a shorter amount of time than Ethercycle.”