As an Australian strategy and design agency, DotCollective prides themselves on the fact that what sets them apart is what actually brings us all closer together.
“For us, it comes down to the way we approach things,” says Brendon Nicholas, founder and technical director at DotCollective. “The way we communicate, the way we handle merchants, the way we hire—it’s all centered around just being human.”
DotCollective brings this core value into everything they do, across online, retail, and technical integrations that cater to unified commerce experiences. With teams in both Australia and New Zealand, they also focus on breaking the barrier between clients and agencies by working closely together and having experts who understand the local markets and retailers they’re working with.
And in a partnership that’s spanned over eight years, DotCollective has used Shopify to make complex commerce solutions appear simple and impactful—all backed by the strong engineering principles their teams embrace.
As a result of partnering with Shopify, DotCollective has achieved:
- $1.4 billion total client GMV
- 45% average client revenue growth YoY
- 32% average decrease in bounce rate
The challenge: Manage nightmare platforms
DotCollective will be the first to admit they had a rocky start working with ecommerce technology. “We just had nightmare stories,” says Brendon. “Rogue Magento [now Adobe Commerce] builds, endless nights, weekends, things crashing while trying to support retailers’ anxieties—it just never felt right.”
Despite trying different platforms like WordPress, wooCommerce, and BigCommerce, DotCollective still ran into issues. They found they were putting so much effort into patching solutions together, dealing with security issues, and managing the infrastructure of these bolt-on platforms that they didn’t have time to focus on the commerce experiences they were creating. At the same time, the brands they were working with were feeling the pressure to grow on a modern platform that would allow them to keep up as the landscape shifted.
The solution: Lean on the extensibility of Shopify
“That was around the time that the Shopify Plus offering was really kicking off,” says Brendon. “It was really perfect timing for us, and we said, ‘Let’s just go all in on Shopify.’”
Soon after completing their first migration to Shopify, DotCollective was confident they had made the right decision. They completed the complex integration in six weeks, immediately solving the client’s operational issues.
“The difference was being on a platform where we could focus on what we do well, which is creating the experiences,” says Brendon. “Shopify does everything well, across delivering features, infrastructure, support, and everything that businesses shouldn’t need to worry about.”
DotCollective hasn’t looked back. More than just being a strong technology partner, the Shopify platform and ecosystem have fundamentally shifted the way DotCollective works.
“Shopify’s extensibility framework is levels above anything else out there. It’s changed our job as an agency from customizing and building bespoke systems that needed to be managed and maintained to where everything is fully documented and supported within a native environment.”
— Brendon Nicholas, Founder and Technical Director, DotCollective
Whereas DotCollective used to spend roughly a third of their time doing custom work, teams now almost exclusively work natively on Shopify. That’s allowed them to focus less on development and ongoing support for clients, and more on creating impactful commerce experiences.
A core part of this success is DotApparel, a SaaS-based integration created by DotCollective to connect ERPs with Shopify. With over 130 Shopify stores using DotApparel, the connector saves merchants time through automation and flexibility, empowering them to self-manage their operations.
For example, when Purebaby came to DotCollective, they were struggling with their Magento (now Adobe Commerce) platform. By migrating their online store to Shopify, DotCollective helped the Australia-based organic baby apparel brand update its shopping journey to include interactive purchase checklists, personalized gifting with profiles, events, and registries, and an omnichannel loyalty program powered by Yotpo. Within three years, they were able to dramatically increase their revenue by 600%. “When you see a brand that’s suffering because of bad tech choices, and you can get them back on track—that’s the most rewarding part for me,” says Brendon.
Make the most of unified sales channels
Because Shopify’s ecommerce and point of sale (POS) systems share the same back end, DotCollective has been able to help clients unify their online and in-store experiences in creative ways.
For example, DotCollective helped one youth footwear collective create fun, interactive sizing experiences for back-to-school shopping, while also offering the option for parents to skip the rush in-store or reorder quickly through their new loyalty program. “We really wanted to focus on that aspect of managing a family that’s going back to school,” says Brendon. “That shopping experience can get pretty crazy, but on Shopify, we’re making sure it’s seamless.”
With a large Australian haircare franchise, DotCollective focused closely on the data. They shifted the retailer’s online store to a Shopify Hydrogen stack before turning their attention to their end-of-life POS solution on NetSuite. By unifying a single view of data across both channels, the retailer can now access in-store performance metrics, track inventory across the entire business with radio-frequency identification (RFID), and easily manage discounts and sustainability charges.
Shopify’s extensibility also means that brands can test new apps and features across channels to find what works—without having to make huge investments. “You can literally switch a feature on with a click of a button, or install an app and configure it a bit,” says Brendon. “That flexibility and agility is a huge advantage of being on Shopify.”
DotCollective put this flexibility to test when they had an influx of clients looking to add a click-and-collect option to their online stores ahead of Black Friday. They wanted to connect the online and in-store experiences during their busiest shopping season while simplifying both. “Adding the Shopify click-and-collect feature is so simple,” says Brendon. “And having it in the checkout is a game changer because it’s so often missed in the cart.” For one high-fashion retailer, DotCollective designed and developed an omnichannel click-and-collect experience that added 3.5% more revenue with months of launching.
This influx also brought a renewed focus for DotCollective to integrate all aspects of order routing and fulfillment directly into Shopify, including ship-from-store, floor-to-door, as well as click-and-collect. While these operations are traditionally managed through backend platforms like enterprise resource planning (ERPs) or order management systems (OMSs), DotCollective’s clients can simply adjust order routing rules, prioritize shipments from the closest stores, and optimize their inventory all on Shopify.
Trade custom builds for reusable frameworks
With the way the agency has been growing, DotCollective has been able to prioritize the clients they want to work with. They can pay attention to early signals from brands to find the right cultural fit, focusing on the industries they know best—apparel and fashion, followed closely by health and franchisee businesses.
“Because we work mostly in certain industries, there are a lot of similarities between clients’ requirements,” says Brendon. “Sometimes, we think ‘Hey, we’ve actually just done that,’ and we can spend half a day on the migration and take more time tailoring it to their brand.”
Not only does this reusability give DotCollective access to established frameworks for various capabilities like promotional logic, checkout widgets, and new account creation—it also brings more value to their clients who quickly gain access to new sites without the costs of building custom.
For example, Scanlan Theodore came to DotCollective with the goal of making a more intentional shopping experience ahead of their plans for global expansion. On Shopify, they kept their design clean and simple. Instead of having multiple banners or carousels, the site houses a central homepage image that then flows straight into the latest products. The redesign mirrors the way Scanalan customers shop—allowing them to get right to the PDPs and add to cart—and has resulted in a 25% increase in transactions.
That same flexibility applies to building any sales that brands want to run. With Shopify’s automation workflows, DotCollective has helped many of its clients turn sales from a massive ordeal into a non-issue.
“There have been so many discovery meetings where I’ve heard businesses speak about how they’re up on Christmas Eve pushing a collection live. When I show them how Shopify can automate so much of it for them, it’s often met with disbelief that it’s that easy.”
— Brendon Nicholas, Founder and Technical Director, DotCollective
The results: Turn a clear roadmap into measured success
DotCollective measures their success using three pillars: happy clients, happy teams, and a growing bottom line. “We’ve had those foundations from the start, but we used to get a lot more turnover when we were dealing with other platform headaches,” says Brendon. “Since moving to Shopify and focusing on one platform, it’s meant that the whole team is moving in the same direction.”
The agency has swapped a reactive approach for a clear roadmap that’s made it easier to manage client satisfaction. It’s also translated into the concrete success that DotCollective has been aiming for. In total, the agency has helped deliver $1.4 billion total client gross merchandise value (GMV). Their clients have increased their average order value (AOV) by 25% and achieved a 32% average decrease in bounce rate. And when they’ve activated Shopify Payments and Shop Pay, their clients have seen an average increase in total express checkout conversions of 32%, with an average increase in conversion rate of 3.6%.
DotCollective has also helped clients cut their total cost of ownership. Before migrating, one apparel retailer was spending upwards of 60% of their budget on support and maintenance costs just to keep their site running. After 12 months on Shopify, those costs are now down to just 20%, meaning they can instead invest in growth activities like new features and initiatives, including building a loyalty program.
To top it off, Shopify’s site speed has been night and day for DotCollective’s clients. When the agency helped a leading menswear brand in Australia rebuild their site on Shopify’s Online Store 2.0, they were able to achieve all core web models within three months post launch. “It’s become a metric we don’t really have to monitor,” says Brendon. “Once a site is up on Shopify, it’s going to be running.”
As for what’s next, the agency plans to still keep a strong focus on retail, with intentions to bring their unified commerce services more upmarket. With that, they’re expanding their DotApparel solution into other ERP’s like Harmony, D365 and Netsuite, which they’ll soon be able to seamlessly integrate with Shopify and push globally. As Brendon describes it, “Right now, everything is at the speed of light.”
