Tesla Motors
Tesla Motors designs and sells high-performance, highly efficient electric sports cars — with no compromises. Tesla Motors cars combine style, acceleration, and handling with advanced technologies that make them among the quickest and the most energy-efficient cars on the road.
Interview with Eric Mueller
Shopify
Tell us your role in the Tesla Motors Shop.
Eric
I am co-owner of a web development company called Themepark (http://themepark.com)— we’re a “boutique” web agency doing work for clients like SIRIUS Satellite Radio, Scholastic, Pandora, the DNC, UCLA Film School, Century 21, Coldwell Banker, National Banana, and lots of others.
My partner John Boyden is the main design/UI guy, and I’m the technology guy… or to extend the theme park metaphor, he figures out where the loops go on the roller coaster and where to put the water fountains, and I lay the cement and steel. Or something like that.
Tesla called us in 2006 to help them design and build their web site (http://teslamotors.com), their Shopify site (which you can see at TeslaMotors.com, then click “merchandise” in the upper right corner) came at the end of last year.
Shopify
How did you find out about Shopify?
Eric
It was probably during the Great Ruby On Rails Explosion of 2006… for a few months there it seemed like RoR was all anyone was talking about, and RoR-related projects were getting tons of attention, especially Shopify.
I remember the first time I saw Shopify and thinking “wow, this is heck of a lot more elegant than Yahoo! Stores.” There’s a certain “Web 2.0” design aesthetic which you guys implemented well…. the pre-made templates all had style, and the Shopify admin pages reminded me of the Mac OS: just enough features to do everything we needed but no more. The site was organized, uncluttered and just felt clean.
Once I had a chance to vette the technology side of Shopify (i.e. “does it run credit cards? check… can I modify templates? check… does it handle shipping intelligently and give us enough choices there? check…”) it was that aesthetic response that really “sold” me on Shopify.
I’m only bummed that they didn’t put the Roadster itself in the Shopify store… it would have been cool— “Tesla Roadster, $98,000. Click here to add to cart. Special deal: buy two Roadsters, get a free t-shirt.” :-)
Shopify
This is the first Shopify project you’ve worked on. Do you have experience working with other e-commerce solutions for other clients?
Eric
Yes, I actually coded a custom cart for a couple of other Themepark clients (walterfoster.com, klutz.com)…
Shopify
What were the deciding factors in using Shopify over other e-commerce systems?
Eric
…but we didn’t want to use that custom cart for Tesla since we had a tight schedule, and it was faster to use an “off-the-shelf” solution. We also looked at Yahoo! Stores but it’s much more work to customize their look and feel. Plus, I think John and I both felt like we wanted to try out something cool and new. :-)
Shopify
What were your major goals with the design of the Tesla Shop?
Eric
Since John was the designer, I asked him about this. He said “Mainly, we wanted the store to feel like a natural extension of the site— not like we went went with a 3rd-party solution to save money, save time, and give us the best user experience and the best back-office experience (all of which, of course, were the drivers). If our high-end visitors felt like they were getting shooed off to a second-rate shopping cart off in the ether, that was going to reflect badly on the brand.”
Shopify
It’s obvious that the new Tesla Shop is distinct from Tesla Motors’ main web site, yet the visual style is unified across both sites. How would you describe the process of integrating that visual style using Shopify?
Eric
Well, by the time John had to design the Shopify site, we had been working on the main Tesla site for over a year, so the visual language of Tesla was pretty well defined. The tricky part of the integration was in that John looked at the Showroom theme and decided to go from there, since we wanted to minimize page loads (which has a direct impact on sales— less page loads = easier shopping = more conversion).
John looked at Showroom and then designed the site from scratch. The actual technical integration wasn’t too bad, though making sure the fixed-height layout was consistent across all the major browsers (including Firefox and Safari on the Mac) was tricky. As for talking to the Shopify API, once I was able to grok the technical architecture of a Shopify store and the template files, it wasn’t much different than coding any JavaScript-heavy web site. (Daniel isn’t kidding when he says that Shopify template is “recommended for advanced users”— there’s a lot of clever stuff going on in there.)
1.866.704.0252
