Shopify over BigCommerce

In 2014 — after analyzing the ecommerce platform options — we moved from BigCommerce to Shopify because of its larger third-party application marketplace. These applications enabled me to quickly add features with minimal development time so that during my time with the company I successfully developed or implemented the following features:

Trade-In Web Application
Customer Product Reviews System
Live Search Suggestions
Facebook Page Widget
Product Structured Data
Zopim Customer Live Chat
Facebook Like Buttons for Product Pages
YouTube Video Feed
Pre-Order and Custom Order Product Types
Holiday Website Themes
Product Labels from Product Tags
Related Product Recommendations
In-Cart Upsells
Sales Rep Affiliate Selector
Marker Anodization Gallery

In order to add these features, I had to customize our store theme to a high degree.

YPBF Shopify Theme

When building our Shopify store, I chose a theme that had support for large product catalogs, a responsive design, and a sporty style as a starting place. This allowed me to quickly get to feature additions and deliver on customer needs instead of building from scratch.

Collection and product pages were customized to include product reviews and ratings, pre-order agreement forms, social like buttons, structured data, and a product label system.

Many sitewide improvements were also implemented including social media widgets, live chat, live search suggestions, product recommendations, upsells, and holiday themes.

I also created a feed on the homepage to display uploads from the YouTube channel. It promoted the latest YourPbFriend video and a weekly show for used guns. These were populated from two specific playlists and displayed responsively for mobile viewing.

Development Environment

My development and customization workflow involved the Shopify code editor at first, but eventually a local environment thanks to the Shopify Theme Kit. Modification of the frontend involved the Shopify Liquid templating language, JavaScript, jQuery, and of course HTML and CSS/SCSS.

Trade-In Web Application

To fully leverage our paintball gun trading experience, I created a trade-in application for accepting offers from customers. The customers were asked a series of questions regarding the trade offer and were required to upload images of their gear. The deal was assigned a unique trade number and negotiated through a series of email communications.

I built the frontend with Bootstrap and JavaScript and the backend with PHP. The trade form frontend verified that the customer provided all the required information including attaching photos. Once submitted, the backend created a unique trade number/ID, checked all required information was included, and sent emails to both the customer and staff. From there, all negotiation was carried out by email. This workflow was chosen because it was similar to existing practice and did not require extra logins for a communications portal.

The success of the trade program was a testament not only to what was offered — top-dollar credit from used gear towards new and other used gear — but also to the quality of the trade-in web application. This was easy to see by the size of YourPbFriend's used gun collection, how quickly that inventory turned over, and the overwhelming number of trade offers received. The program outclassed the competition in trade application experience, credit received, trade volume, product details, and used gun selection. It was so successful that it became integral to the company's business model and is imitated to this day.

Digital Marketing

YourPbFriend digital marketing campaigns primarily utilized website banners, email marketing, retargeting ads — the majority of which I created — and SEO.

Campaigns

The ads either served products that customers had viewed or promoted the trade program and seasonal deals. I placed them on PbNation, the Google Display Network, and the Facebook (Meta) Ads Network, and I optimized the ad results with A/B testing. However, the latter two ad networks eventually restricted paintball and airsoft advertisements. Because of this, we attempted to only market gear (without guns) as a way around the Google and Facebook restrictions, but ultimately failed.

Many campaigns simply targeted customers who visited our website or subscribed to our email marketing. These used the same banners and often advertised new gun releases, special trade-in credit incentives, and sales.

I also created most of YourPbFriend's social media cover photos and profile pictures, always ensuring that they were compatible with all screen sizes.

SEO

I performed several search engine optimization tasks for YourPbFriend. These included:

Sitemap submission
Google Search Console and Analytics setup
Page load time optimization
Keyword targeting
Content generation

When selecting the theme to build upon, I made sure it had responsive design and featured structured data so that Google could generate Rich Results for top ranking pages. For keyword targeting and content generation, I set up Google Analytics and worked with the team to identify customer interest and need. This allowed me to optimize existing pages and collections for the keyword phrases paintballers and airsofters were searching. It also allowed me to identify other things they were searching for and create pages for those as well. Due to the success of the business, I did not need to implement a backlink strategy; we were receiving backlinks organically. This is not always the case, so this illustrated how well we filled industry needs.

Used Paintball Gun Rating System

Shortly after the launch of YourPbFriend's trade-in program, a colleague and I realized that there needed to be a standard for appraising a used paintball gun's condition — one that would generate consistent, objective ratings. We knew that if we could accomplish this, buyer trust would increase immensely. So we got to work on creating it.

To generate reliable ratings, we first identified the two major areas of concern when purchasing a used gun: the mechanical condition and the cosmetic condition. From there, we broke down both major areas into their various parts and assigned weighted values to each on a natural number scale of 1–5 (1 being the worst and 5 the best). These included the condition of parts like the barrel, bolt, ASA, feedneck, laser eyes, etc. When each pre-determined sub-area was assigned a value and averaged, it produced an overall rating for the gun on a scale of 1.0–5.0.

After thorough testing, we created a spreadsheet for rapidly generating ratings. Each area of concern had its own description and dropdown from which a rating could be set (e.g., 1—Heavily Scratched to 5—Like New). The spreadsheet streamlined the process of listing used paintball guns and helped produce more objective ratings. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of the rating calculator spreadsheet anymore.

The creation of the used paintball gun rating system and spreadsheet implementation contributed greatly to the success of the trade program. Each used gun listing linked to information about our rating system, and, as a result, we saw a decrease in customer questions regarding used gun listings. We also received praise for our transparency. This improvement contributed to making the YourPbFriend trade program the most successful in the paintball industry.