How BackJoy Increased Sales 71% Migrating from Demandware to Shopify Plus

Trust is the currency of business.

That’s why when Rachel Hollingsworth — the Digital Marketing Manager at BackJoy, which helps people reduce back pain by improving their posture — got up from her chair during our interview for this feature, we were careful to look at where she’d been seated.

And there it was … one of BackJoy’s best-selling products.

“It’s not marketing speak,” she says. “We use the products we sell because we know they work and can help millions of people suffering from back pain.”

Hollingsworth and the BackJoy team are certainly trustworthy but weren’t able to help as many people as they wanted recently.

The culprit?

The BackJoy team wasn’t completely satisfied with their ecommerce site.

Cheating Time: How to Optimize in Half the Time

Before we show you the improvements in conversion rates and the lifts in organic traffic and revenue BackJoy recently achieved …

You should know the BackJoy team is a data-driven and creative bunch.

It’s one reason Backjoy began to look for an ecommerce platform that would better position it to optimize its site in real time. You see BackJoy does not have an in-house developer, which means it couldn’t rapidly and easily make changes to its Demandware ecommerce site.

Instead, it had to rely on third-party developers to launch and maintain its site meaning BackJoy couldn’t move as quickly as it desired.

Besides the added costs and time associated with making minor adjustments, BackJoy says, their site:

• Wasn’t responsive or mobile friendly
• Offered limited capabilities to run tests and optimize
• Couldn’t adjust the site’s metadata, which negatively impacted SEO

It meant BackJoy wasn’t able to fully capitalize on major publicity it earned or realize its full potential during the crucial Black Friday, Cyber Monday holiday sales period.

“It required much more work,” Hollingsworth says. “If we wanted something done we knew we had to budget twice the amount of time as we do today.”

What changed?

After nearly two years on Demandware, BackJoy migrated to Shopify Plus with the help of Interstellar, a digital marketing agency that helps merchants better connect with their audiences and create experiences that lift awareness and sales.

The migration took just four months and BackJoy launched its Shopify-Plus-powered store in November of 2016.

What could Hollingsworth now do quickly herself?

Instead of paying a developer to update or make changes to the site, Hollingsworth now does most of the work herself in a lot less time. Importantly, she can also change the site’s metadata which, along with Interstellar’s work prior to launch, has significantly improved BackJoy’s organic search results.

As Hollingsworth explains:

It’s a huge time saver. We can make changes on the fly now so I can now focus on more strategic areas of the business instead of getting bogged down working on the site.

The migration also positioned BackJoy to easily do something it couldn’t previously: customize the checkout to offer complementary digital products like BackChat, an educational video series designed to help customers reduce their pain.

Since BackChat is a digital product unlike the pain relief and posture improvement products the company sells, Interstellar customized the Plus checkout to generate unique download codes allowing BackChat customers access to this digital product.

“I’ve been through a lot of launches and this was the easiest I’ve ever seen,” says Tre Vertuca, BackJoy’s President & COO. “Interstellar has a great team with a lot of expertise. They really shined.”

Besides optimizing the site for SEO and making BackJoy’s site easier to find for search engines, the Interstellar team also worked with BackJoy to run a myriad of tests aimed at converting more of the newfound organic search traffic it was getting.

These tests aimed primarily at …

• Landing page and traffic source combinations
• Product bundles to lift sales

“Working together has allowed us to run tests a lot faster and make changes a lot quicker,” Hollingsworth says. “Working with Interstellar and migrating to Shopify Plus has cut the time it takes to run a test in half.”

However, a new threat did reveal itself immediately after moving to Shopify Plus.

The Invisible Company

Unfortunately, it’s a fact of life for many merchants …

High-risk or fraudulent orders can crimp margins and cause merchants to take losses and pay chargeback fees that reduce capital available for growth focused activities. While fraud isn’t a significant problem for BackJoy, it is an issue but one the company now says it has the upper hand on after replatforming.

“We’re getting a lot of value out of Shopify Plus we didn’t expect,” Vertuca says. “The fraud protection offered is something we didn’t have on Demandware. Shopify Plus automatically flags high-risk orders and allows us to act quicker and more proactively.”

It has also freed BackJoy to spend more time optimizing its new responsive site and lifting the number of repeat purchases made on mobile devices. Separately, Interstellar credits BackJoy’s deep understanding of the importance of SEO for many of the performance gains it has recently experienced.

“High performing sites require a lot of SEO work long before you ever get to the design phase,” says Ryan Geiger, Interstellar’s Chief Experience Strategist. “The BackJoy team understands this and has been a pleasure to work with. It really does take two to achieve the results we have.”

Those results, since partnering with Interstellar and migrating to Shopify Plus, include …

One Month After Launch

• 66.39% lift in conversion rate
• 71.40% increase in sales
• 11.97% boost in organic traffic
• 101.88% increase in sales from organic traffic

Six Months After Launch

• 22.11% lift in conversions
• 7.79% increase in total sales

“The conversion rate numbers are really good and are constantly getting better,” Vertuca says. “We’re glad we can do a lot of this on our own now but we’re also grateful to Interstellar and their expertise.”

There’s still one major hurdle to jump: Backjoy is, relatively speaking, invisible to most.

Pain-Free Commerce

That just might be a tear in Geiger’s eye …

You see the BackJoy team can now manage store merchandising, launch sales and marketing campaigns, and execute on most of its branding and content initiatives without significant development assistance. It means that BackJoy may need a bit less of the expertise that originally drew the company to Interstellar.

But what about the visibility problem?

“We’ve got a solid portfolio of products but there is a large online audience that does not know about them,” Vertuca says. “The plan is to get the word out while also introducing new products.”

It may be just a matter of time though before people suffering from back pain come to trust BackJoy intimately. Remember, these are people who use and love the products they sell. In fact, the Interstellar team is now hooked as well and also uses the products it’s helping showcase to the world.

“It makes it really easy to get up in the morning when you’re working with a company like BackJoy that’s not just in it for the money but truly wants to help its customer live pain-free,” Geiger says. “They truly value their customers’ health. It’s not just a marketing ploy. They believe in the products they sell and we believe in them. We love working with them.”