Molekule grows subscription revenue and conversions after replatforming from Adobe Commerce

Molekule was founded in 2014 with the goal of creating cleaner indoor air using the power of science. The company has earned international acclaim for its breakthrough, proprietary PECO-HEPA technology which destroys pollutants at a molecular level. The brand is now a market leader for premium indoor air purifiers.

Although Molekule had used Shopify in the past, the brand moved to a custom-built Adobe Commerce solution for its customization capabilities. The team soon found that the high costs and developer reliance associated with managing Adobe Commerce were unsustainable, and in the midst of an acquisition, decided to replatform back to Shopify Plus.

“What we had with Adobe Commerce was not helping us drive revenue or operational efficiency,” says Rachel Beisel, Molekule’s Senior Vice President of Marketing. “We had to maintain a lot of things manually, which distracted us from focusing on things like merchandising and optimizing our storefront for conversion.”

Since moving to Shopify Plus, Molekule has seen:

Challenge

Adobe Commerce complexity was hampering Molekule’s growth and hurting its bottom line. Almost any change the team wanted to make to its website required expert assistance from external development teams. The process was time-consuming and expensive. The company’s homegrown subscription processes with Adobe Commerce were also difficult to manage and, as a result, Molekule wasn’t meeting its new subscriber growth goals.

Similarly, the team had to custom-build tools for important tasks such as running sales and promotions. These tools were labor-intensive, unreliable and consistently prompted issues that added to the team’s growing workload.

“We’re not in the game of building ecommerce software, but that’s what it became with Adobe Commerce,” Rachel says. “It was the majority of the focus as opposed to focusing on growth.”

A tipping point came after a Adobe Commerce software update significantly impacted Molekule’s site speed. Checkout page loading times ballooned to over a minute, costing the company revenue as frustrated customers left before completing their purchases. The team was fed up with being pulled away from growth and innovation. To keep ahead of the competition, Molekule needed a more simple, user-friendly solution that offered a superior customer experience.

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Solution

Molekule chose to replace Adobe Commerce with Shopify Plus to save time and money without losing any key functionalities. Shopify supported the Molekule team ahead of the launch to identify and address any potential risks and ensure the company’s critical systems, such as its NetSuite ERP software, would integrate seamlessly.

“Shopify understood our business well before we signed on the dotted line,” says Rachel. “They took the time to explain to us how everything would work together, which was really helpful.”

The team was pleased to find that many functionalities requiring custom solutions on Adobe Commerce came out-of-the-box with Shopify Plus. For those that didn’t, the team delved into the Shopify app ecosystem to find replacements for its custom-built Adobe Commerce tools.

With subscriptions being a large part of Molekule’s business, it selected subscription management app Recharge to help it scale its subscription business. By leveraging Shopify's Subscriptions API infrastructure, Recharge supported the customized subscription functionalities Molekule needed to maximize growth. The team chose Loop to handle returns and exchanges and Okendo for reviews, which were challenging to integrate with Adobe Commerce but were easy to source and display on product detail pages (PDPs) and elsewhere with Shopify. Although it was already using Klaviyo for email and SMS marketing, the app’s tight integration with Shopify helped the team unlock several new capabilities not possible with Adobe Commerce.

Another consequence of Adobe Commerce complexity was that Molekule’s various software systems and applications couldn’t easily exchange information with each other. This was resolved when Molekule moved to Shopify Plus and incorporated middleware from Celigo to create connections between its apps, providing a necessary layer to ensure the team didn’t have to take down the entire system when customizing any part of its app or Shopify ecosystem. All this was accomplished in much less time than what many people on the team thought possible.

“The transition to Shopify was way faster than expected,” says Rachel. “I don’t think anyone believed that it would be three months, and that’s what it was.”

Result

With Shopify Plus, Molekule instantly became more nimble and accelerated its growth. The team could easily update the layout of pages and create relevant content for people visiting its site. For instance, when rampant wildfires in June 2023 prompted a 61% spike in website traffic as people searched for clean air solutions, Molekule was able to respond quickly by updating its website to ensure people found what they were looking for fast.

“We had an opportunity to help people affected by wildfire smoke find clean air solutions, and being on Shopify allowed us to do that,” says Rachel.

In another example, the team tested an update to its PDPs to highlight the cost savings of its subscription program. This change would have required costly external resources with Adobe Commerce. But with Shopify, it was quick and easy to handle internally. As a result, 100-115 new subscribers began signing up daily, far more than Molekule had seen before.

The brand’s customer experience also quickly improved. While site speed was a constant struggle with Adobe Commerce, the team measured dramatic improvements after replatforming. With a quicker and more responsive website, customers spent more time shopping and completing purchases, which was reflected in lower bounce rates, along with higher conversion rates and improved abandoned cart conversion rates.

Looking ahead, Molekule is focused on growth in the US and internationally. The expansion stores feature of Shopify Plus, which allows for updates to push to multiple different country stores simultaneously, was another reason the team strategically chose the platform.