Shopify had the opportunity to interview Andrew Waite, Managing Director at Convert Digital, to discuss how partnering with Shopify helped Convert Digital innovate and grow their business.
Convert Digital is a leading Australian commerce agency that designs and develops scalable, high-converting commerce experiences on Shopify.
Convert’s mission is to “simplify complex problems” for their customers. They are deeply passionate practitioners, who focus on innovation and superior service. But delivering on this was easier said than done when working on monolithic commerce platforms, which limited their ability to deliver exceptional client experiences. As a result, Convert Digital partnered with Shopify in 2017.
Since building a Shopify practice, Convert Digital has:
- Grown their overall business
- Expanded their client portfolio
- Increased their retainer size and average project value with more enterprise clients
The challenge: Technical issues with legacy platforms damaged the client experience and stalled business growth
After three years working with monolithic platforms, Convert Digital's business growth had stalled as they spent time and resources managing overly complex infrastructure and buggy software. Rather than getting to build innovative new solutions, the team felt bogged down in bug fixes. And their clients felt the same way, watching their retainer dollars pour into maintenance contracts while also paying high platform fees just to maintain the status quo.
Says Andrew Waite, Managing Director at Convert, “The biggest issue with [legacy platforms] was the negative impact on our client relationships. We were spending all of our time fixing site issues instead of building cool new stuff. This created unnecessary tension with our clients.”
By the time the team had fixed technical issues, they were left with too few resources to proactively enhance their clients’ websites. Additionally, their clients experienced extended downtimes even for minor website updates.
This negatively impacted both client and employee satisfaction rates, making it difficult to retain customers and keep the employees needed to serve a growing customer base.
The Convert Digital team knew their product releases and updates for client websites needed to be faster and more innovative. They needed to partner with a dependable commerce platform to minimize the time spent on technical resolution and make space for the stimulating, boundary-pushing, innovative work both they and their clients wanted to do.
The solution: Shopify and Convert partnership drives innovation and increased market demand
Convert was ready for a change. They found it by partnering with Shopify.
On Shopify, the Convert team spends the bulk of their time on shipping new features and scaling their clients’ websites. It’s a return to the proactive approach at the core of their philosophy; they can now “simplify complex problems” because the platform itself is designed to absorb complexity, easy to use, manage, customize, and deploy. This means that when the Convert team is tackling complexity, they’re doing it with powerful yet streamlined tools that help them elevate their customers’ digital experiences, rather than focusing on fixes.
This has transformed Convert’s relationship with its customers.
“There were a lot of things we couldn’t do [on other platforms],” says Andrew. “Every single one of those has been unpacked and solved. Now, we're having exciting conversations. They're about what we are doing next, not what we are trying to fix.”
Shopify as a platform is easier to use, at once offering more robust features within a more elegant and sophisticated architecture. This has dramatically increased the number of ways the Convert team has to develop new features, keeping their clients ahead of the curve.
But it’s not just the technical backend of the platform that has so radically changed what Convert can do for its customers; it’s also the partnership with the Shopify team. At Shopify, partnership means partnership, with direct access to support, and the feeling among the Convert team they’re actually being listened to. With Shopify’s extensive Research and Development investment of $1.7 billion dollars in 2023 alone, and thousands of engineers focused on new feature releases, Convert can see their feedback built into the product roadmap.
“I think the biggest thing that surprised us is the platform growth from a feature development perspective,” reports Andrew. “It feels like every time we're looking for something, Shopify is already ahead, and they're listening. We don't feel like the platform is a barrier.”
The Shopify ecosystem and framework have streamlined the agency's internal business processes and increased the average value of contracts dramatically. Now, instead of focusing on problem-solving contracts, they have become a go-to agency for clients seeking proactive website enhancements.
Says Andrew: “A lot of things are easier and faster. Even just looking at how we maintain billables and our retention with our existing customers. We've gone from maintenance contracts to very nimble and active retainers, where we're doing proactive development and feature enhancement.”
The outcome: Higher contract values and clients that stick — and refer
Partnering with Shopify immediately led to outsized business returns within the first year of practice expansion and the growth keeps on coming. In 2022, Convert Digital launched a total of 36 sites and in 2023 they doubled down on Shopify and launched a total of 46 sites (27% increase in site launches year).
“We’re seeing forty, fifty, sixty, likely this year 80% year-over-year growth,” reports Andrew. “The outcome of that is a large increase in conversion, minimal downtime, higher IOV (Initial Order Value), and everything else that comes with that.”
With Shopify, Convert Digital can quickly and successfully launch a site, even when the brand doesn’t have an existing online presence.
For instance, premium chocolate brand Koko Black came to Convert Digital with zero online presence. Using Shopify, the team took their site from inception to live in just six weeks.
Ghanda, a surf and streetwear brand, faced website performance and checkout issues on their previous commerce platform, leading to long customer wait times and lost revenue. Convert Digital efficiently transitioned Ghanda to a headless Shopify Plus store, resolving these checkout problems and increasing the brand’s revenue by 9.1%.
Success for their customers is success for Convert.
“Customers who work with us on Shopify have minimal problems compared to those who work with us who are not on Shopify. So from a retention standpoint, that helps significantly.”
–Andrew Waite, Managing Director, Convert Digital
Ultimately, Shopify’s ease of use combined with dedicated support from the Partners team have helped fuel Convert Digital’s impressive growth: growth in their customer base; growth in what they can do; growth in ways they can hone and grow their craft; growth in satisfaction and innovation all around. Convert is working on what they want to work on, with customers who are excited and eager to have them there.
What could be better than that?
Join partners like Convert Digital in building high growth Shopify practices, powered by best in class commerce technology. Get started today.
