ROLE
Platform
Responsive web
Overview
The Amish House is a bootstrapped retailer of Amish furniture with a complex catalogue featuring over 1,000 configurable products and 2M+ total product variations. As partner and product lead, I owned the design, development, and optimization of our Shopify store, as well as all digital brick-and-mortar initiatives. Over a period of four years, I helped scale the company from launch to $1.5M+ in annual revenue with effectively zero digital marketing budget.
As one of a two-person team, the challenges we had to surmount were numerous and varied. Below are a sampling of problems we had to solve, as well as processes, considerations, and design principles that guided my approach as I designed, developed, and optimized our DTC Shopify site.
The Amish House offers 2M+ product variations across more than 50 product categories. Creating spreadsheets for and importing these to the website presented a considerable challenge.
To overcome this, I built a simple python-based web app to generate product import spreadsheets from manufacturer pricing sheets, which varied considerably in their format and quality. Using this tool, we were able to generate and upload product spreadsheets for 1M+ product variants in several weeks.
As we optimized the site, I regularly conducted unmoderated usability testing to unearth usability issues and qualitative insights. Given how lean our team was and the size and complexity of the website, this also served as an additional layer of QA.
As I designed and built out PDPs, I reviewed usability testing findings, sales calls, support emails, and other similar data to answer: what questions might visitors have as they browse our products, and how can we answer them in in the right place and at the right time as they arise? This consideration manifested in a number of design decisions:
Wood selection guide: to mitigate the paradox of choice and help visitors navigate the myriad decisions they must make as they customize their furniture, I added a wood selection guide to the wood selection interface, which opens as an on-page modal to keep visitors on the PDP.
Reassuring microcopy: to assuage visitors' hesitations and potential indecision around selecting a stain, I implemented a hover tooltip on the stain selector with helpful microcopy that lets them know they'll receive stain samples for approval, with up to three more at no charge, before their order is finalized.
Dynamic shipping info: custom furniture shipping can vary widely in pricing and level of service from company to company. Unexpected shipping costs and extended shipping timelines are common causes for cart abandonment. We wanted to ensure this information was communicated clearly upfront. To that end, I implemented 'Get it by' messaging that displayed shipping times dynamically depending on product category, as well as clearly communicated our flat-rate shipping costs and the level of service.
Enlarged stains upon hover: when users hover over a stain swatch, an enlarged image displays in a tooltip, allowing them to gain a better sense of the wood's unique characteristics, grain, and coloration.
