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ZSpeed Performance
ZSpeed Performance offers premium performance parts for select Nissan and Infiniti car models. The company’s founder built a successful business with a strong following, and when it came time to retire in 2022, he chose to sell ZSpeed to George Sohoritis. George is the co-owner of SOHO Motorsports, which specializes in maintenance, tuning, fabrication and custom builds for Nissan and Infiniti cars. It was a natural fit for him to take on ZSpeed as a second business.
The business was doing great, but the ZSpeed site needed an overhaul. It was built using WordPress and WooCommerce and was more complex to update and maintain than it would be on Shopify. The existing site looked dark and outdated, "like a site from the early 2000s", as George puts it. There was an opportunity to create a better shopping experience and increase customer confidence in the brand.
“We are strictly online sales. It’s not like we have a nice showroom where people can come in and shop. The front page on the website, that is our showroom. Everything is just a lot easier and a lot more user friendly with Shopify, especially on mobile.
A couple years after I bought ZSpeed, stuff settled down, and we were in our groove. I decided to reach out to Ethercycle and get this moved over to Shopify and do a whole redesign.”
We had worked with George previously, helping revamp the Shopify site for SOHO Motorsports and providing some ongoing site maintenance. Although having complete confidence in the Ethercycle team, George wasn’t without worry about switching platforms.
“My only concern was how they were going to get the data from WooCommerce to Shopify. I had no backup, so I was worried if they initiated some kind of transfer or something and then all of a sudden everything would be lost. But Kurt assured me that they could handle it, not a problem at all.”
Designing and developing a custom Shopify Online 2.0 theme
We quickly delivered a design mockup that George says nailed exactly what he wanted. We did the redesign based on our deep ecommerce expertise and our specialized knowledge in the automotive industry. We had talked with George about some of the things he wanted to see on the site and used elements that we know work to provide a great shopping experience for customers looking to buy aftermarket parts for their vehicle.
Fitment is always the driving factor in the purchasing decision. We made it blatantly obvious on the homepage what car brands and models ZSpeed carries parts for. We created multiple ways for the customer to select their vehicle to bring up the parts that will fit their car, including:
- listing the car models in the mega menu and footer
- using a tab for each car model in the section on the homepage that features top sellers
- installing year-make-model search and featuring it in the mega menu, on the homepage, and on collection pages
From the many year-make-model search apps available, we chose one that was the best fit for ZSpeed’s needs — one that was simple, inexpensive, and allowed them to manage the data themselves.
We also added a search bar in the mega menu with a call to action to search by part name, part number, or brand in case the customer wants to go straight to a product they know they need.
We made the button with the CTA for customers to ask questions more prominent and clear than the old site.
Store migration and cleaning up the product catalog
Going from WooCommerce to Shopify meant we could implement a number of checkout improvements, including a cleaner checkout, the ability for customers to have their payment information auto-completed with Shop Pay, and the ability to pull live shipping rate quotes.
We've done enough store migrations that we now use tools we’ve developed ourselves to handle changing the data for all the products, collections, reviews, customers, and orders into the format Shopify will be able to handle, rather than having to rely on third-party SaaS tools. This gives us more control over the process. We also use SEO crawl tools to verify SEO safety during the migration process.
To prevent any problems, we first imported a sample of the data and verified with George that it was correct before doing the full import and conducting spot checks along the way. As a safety net, we also kept the old store available for 30 days after the launch.
When the store was on WooCommerce, it was difficult for George to see and manage the catalog of more than 1000 products, which included a lot of random OEM parts he no longer wanted to sell. The catalog wasn't sortable by brand or other useful categorizations. Orders would sometimes come in for products George didn't even realize were still on the site.
“There would be parts on that site that it would say are in stock, but lo and behold, have been discontinued for years. Or maybe a price hasn't been updated in five or six years. So I would get one order a month or something like that where I would just ship it and take the loss.”
Migrating to Shopify meant that George could more easily see the catalog by categories and then drop the products he no longer wanted to sell and update any out-of-date prices. We unpublished the listings for products he no longer wanted to sell (which ended up being about ¾ of the catalog). For the remaining products, we took extra steps to ensure consistency, including recutting product photos and cleaning up the product description formatting. We also tagged each product with its corresponding year-make-model fitments.
ZSpeed didn't have much in terms of email marketing set up previously. Sending simple checkout abandonment and browse abandonment emails was a clear and easy win. ZSpeed didn't need the power of a platform like Klaviyo, so we set these up using Shopify's built-in marketing automation tool and templates.
The experience working together
The work went smoothly and George says he appreciated how easy it was to work with us.
“They had a schedule of what the steps were and when they expected to complete each one. Every single one of those steps were completed within a couple of days of the expected date, so I'd say they met the timeline perfectly. Communication was excellent and the support was fantastic. I had an issue maybe two or three days after we launched. I emailed them and they responded within about 30 minutes and got it fixed. The customer service and the response time was extraordinary.”
Successful launch and increased add-to-cart, reached checkout, and conversion rates
The migration went perfectly and we successfully launched the new site in early May 2024.
“When you get on the site, everything is new, it's updated, it’s well maintained. Someone's obviously here and taking care of this. The look probably drives more people to stay on the site and make a purchase just because everything looks fresh. Also, the products that are now on the website are the ones I want to sell and what we're known for, and all the prices and everything match up to where they need to be.”
In the two months after launching, ZSpeed saw a significant improvement in key metrics over the previous two-month period, including:
📈add-to-cart rate increasing by 100%
📈reached checkout rate increasing by 195%
📈conversion rate increasing by 133%
The new checkout abandonment emails get a 70% open rate and a 5% click rate and have been leading to about two or three sales per week.
George says that having the "ask your question" button more visible has led to more customer inquiries, which have also led to sales. He also says the Shopify interface makes it simpler and easier for him to reply to inquiries than when the shop was on WooCommerce (e.g. he no longer has to manually copy and paste the customer's email into the “to:” field).
George says other merchants in the automotive industry who want to improve their Shopify site or move to the Shopify platform would be well served by Ethercycle.
“They’re into cars and aftermarket stuff, so they do have a bit of a passion for it, which I think makes them 10 times better at building a website for a business in this industry than someone that has no idea about cars. They know what a car enthusiast would look for and how things need to be laid out. Their system of how they operate and how they get things done is perfect. I wouldn't change anything.”
Our Work Together
Ethercycle helped ZSpeed Performance to:
- Migrate their site from WooCommerce to Shopify.
- Create a fresh and modern design that is easy for customers to navigate and find the right performance parts for their car.
- Clean up and update their product catalog to better showcase the products they want to sell and cut what they no longer want to sell.
- Set up checkout abandonment and browse abandonment emails.
- Increase add-to-cart rate by 100%, reached checkout rate by 195%, and conversion rate by 133%.