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Case Study

Northstar Bison

Platform
Shopify Plus
Scope of Work
MarketingWebsite DesignUser TestingPerformance Marketing
Industry
Food and Beverage
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Brief

Midwest Grass fed Bison brand with a website that was handcuffing them to sluggish growth. Backend issues, high cart abandons, and a poor mobile experience were put out to pasture with Shopify Plus. Their results? +75% increase in conversion rate, +288% increase in revenue, all with half as many pages to reach checkout.

Northstar bison's website in desktop and mobile screenshots

WHY Northstar Bison is a Wisconsin-based bison ranching company. They raise 100% grass-fed bison on open pastures. Using their own ‘Zero Stress Field Harvest’, they’re able to humanely raise and harvest their bison for the highest quality and healthiest animals around. Their company was doing well offline but their past website was holding them back online. High cart abandons, poor mobile experience, and confusing user journeys were all to blame. While other areas of their business were flourishing, their website wasn’t performing to their standards.

Northstar Bison needed:

  • A full website audit to discover what wasn’t working.

  • Detailed marketing assessment to set a strong foundation for the website.

  • A new, seamless consumer journey to speed up orders.

  • Better integrations to handle new online ordering at scale.

HOW

Shopify was a natural fit for Northstar Bison. It has the flexibility and integrations that they needed while being an intuitive ecommerce focused platform. After a site audit, we suggested major changes to their user experience. These included changes to the main navigation, product description pages, full checkout process, and a complete overhaul of the mobile site. After these changes, we suggested integrations like Sezzle for flexible payments, ReCharge and Klaviyo for subscription and loyalty programs. We worked closely with Northstar Bison to adjust their marketing for the new website and follow best practices.

Northstar Bison's website in three panels

WHAT

After integrating Klaviyo with Shopify, Northstar Bison was able to seamlessly capture emails. We set up standardized emails for their checkout and return process. After some best practices, their email marketing is educating subscribers and continuing to drive sales. Yotpo provides customers with better information about products. These tools have been instrumental in consumer confidence and increasing the number of orders on the site.

RESULTS

Northstar Bison has seen an explosion of sales. Their site literally got out of their customer’s way and the orders rolled in. Mobile orders surged, their conversion rate doubled. The better designed checkout process required half as many pages to checkout as their past site. The site paid for itself in revenue in the first 5 days. In the first year on Shopify, Northstar Bison doubled their next best selling year.

+136.1% increase in sessions
+75.27% increase in conversion rate
+288.5% increase in revenue
-51.03% decrease in pages per session

That's right, we decreased the number of pages per session to see these increases in conversion rate and revenue. The old site required 12 pages for checkout.