Case Study: The Aromatherapy Company
The Aromatherapy Company is a market leader in home fragrance and body care products for New Zealand and Australia with over 5 signature brands and 1,000 stockists worldwide.
To bring their shopping experience to the next level and improve their workflow, The Aromatherapy Company were interested in a Headless Commerce (JamStack) website. I worked with The Aromatherapy Company through local Shopify agency KiwiSprout to develop their new website in Astro, backed by Shopify.
The Challenge
With an increased demand for online shopping across New Zealand and Australia, The Aromatherapy Company started to encounter the following challenges:
- Their Shopify Liquid theme was slow, with an average PageSpeed Score of 15/100 for mobile, and a 7.5 second loading time.
- They wanted to simplify their admin workflow in Shopify for running promotions and managing website content.
- Releasing new ideas for shopping experiences was slow, and split-testing was difficult on Shopify using Liquid.
These challenges called for an ambitious solution to meet their growing business needs.
The Solution
To achieve a website that was faster, easier to manage, and built for iterating the shopping experience, I knew that The Aromatherapy Company needed Headless Commerce. Headless Commerce means that the frontend of the website that customers interacts with is kept seperate to the backend that handles the order processing and data (Shopify), giving you more control over the exact way your online store works.
Astro was chosen because it provides the best developer experience for jamstack websites and makes it easy to create fast-loading shopping experiences without comprimising on quality. In combination with Vercel for API routes and hosting, we were able to achieve a number of things not normally possible with Shopify including:
- A 90+/100 PageSpeed Score for mobile and desktop, while still loading a lot of media onto the pages. One big technical win with Astro is being able to use Astro Islands to lazy-load any complex elements of the website, and integrate Partytown for webworkers so that tracking scripts don’t slow down the page.
- By using Vercel Edge middleware, we can run A/B tests on different pages to test the true performance of new features without complex systems or expensive apps.
- Through our ability to use React where needed, we can build custom shopping experiences without needing to pay for and maintain Shopify apps or integrations, such as our custom bundle builder.
Website content has been set up to use Sanity and Shopify Metaobjects, which allows for rich product and page customisation that is easily maintained by The Aromatherapy Company.
The Results
With the new website launched since September 2023, we have so far seen:
- A 40% increase in conversion rate.
- Average page loading time is now 0.5 seconds, a 15x increase on the old website.
Overall, the new website is a resounding success, and has proven to be a significant value-add for The Aromatherapy Company.