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How Bullstrap increased their conversion rate and reduced operating expenses with Platter

Bullstrap offers a series of premium Apple Watch bands, leather iPhone cases, wallets and other accessories. 

They were looking for a way to gain more control over their storefront without needing to involve a developer, as well as improve their core metrics. Bullstrap achieved the following with Platter.

111% Increase in Conversion Rate
26% Increase in Add to Cart Actions
Reduced operating expenses
Customer
Bullstrap
Platform
Shopify Plus
Industry
Apple Accessories

The Problem

Bullstrap's previous theme was a heavily customized version of Parallax. Parallax itself was great as a starting point, but each round of developer customizations made the theme incrementally more difficult to maintain. As a result, the Bullstrap team would often turn to apps to solve for various use cases rather than writing customizations into the theme. The result was a bloated theme codebase that was difficult to customize on the fly.

Why Platter

#1 Streamline internal operations

Smart Theme's flexibility was integral to improving the Bullstrap team's day-to-day operations. They were able to easily build new product and landing pages without needing to download new apps or contact a developer.

#2 Unlock the ability to test new features, faster

Bullstrap benefitted from their subscription to Platter+ by incrementally testing the new features that became available. A great example is Checkout Extensions, which is a recent feature from Platter+ that Bullstrap was able to integrate seamlessly.

#3 Improve key performance indicators

The Platter team worked closely with Bullstrap to design and build a site that was robust enough to meet the specific requirements of their brand and industry vertical. The result was a cleaner user experience and faster page load times, which resulted in an improved conversion rate.

Result

The switch to Platter has positively impacted Bullstrap's conversion rate and has eased day-to-day operations.

Conversion Funnel Improvements

Bullstrap published Smart Theme on February 1st, 2022. The theme has been live on their storefront since then, which at time of writing is about 2 years. In that time period Bullstrap has seen a 26% increase in 'Add to Cart' actions, as is reflected in the below screenshot from their analytics dashboard. For completeness we've also included 'Reached checkout' and 'Sessions converted' in the below screenshot, but the percentage increases shown for those two metrics are the result of a lack of checkout analytics from June of 2020 through August of 2021. In other words, the 3-digit percentage increases are not the result of switching to Smart Theme.

However, it's worth noting that a sustained 2.72% conversion rate over two years is quite strong for their price point and industry vertical.

Bullstrap's Conversion Funnel: February 1st, 2022 through February 1st, 2024 compared to February 1, 2020 through January 31st, 2022.

Despite the lack of conversion data during the full previous period of 2 years, we can still compare conversion rates over shorter periods of time. The below screenshot compares September through December of 2023 to the same time period in 2021. As is clearly illustrated here, the Platter storefront greatly outperforms 2021's conversion rate. Only a sale in December of 2021, which was not repeated in December of 2023, momentarily pushed the legacy storefront's conversion rate past Platter's. This translates to a 111% increase in overall conversion rate during this time period.

Bullstrap's Conversion Rates: September through December of 2023 compared to the same time period in 2021.

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