Peepers increases conversions by 30% with a custom checkout

Peepers is a digital retailer that designs and sells eyewear, like reading glasses, for both men and women. The team had been working on a website redesign and a domain-name overhaul for more than a year, with little progress and frustrating results.

After switching to Shopify Plus, Peepers launched their new website quickly and handled Oprah-level traffic with ease. Since attracting more traffic and customizing their checkout, they saw:

• Increased conversions by 30%
• Average order values grow 20%

Challenge

After investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into their website redesign, Adobe Commerce continued to fall short. Each change was time-consuming and expensive. On top of that, the site was extremely slow and lacked basic functionality that glasses shoppers had grown to expect—like multiple product images and switching between those images.

When the team learned that Peepers was going to be featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, they needed to act fast. There was no way they could launch the new Peepers.com on their existing platform and no way the company could afford to fix it—especially if they wanted to capitalize on the huge spike in traffic Oprah was sure to bring in.

“It was frustrating,” says Hart, “because every time we wanted to change something, the ecommerce platform rep would quote us a price that was tough to swallow. We wound up sitting on so many ideas we just couldn’t do.”

Solutions

Peepers turned to Shopify Plus to quickly and dramatically improve its customer experience in time for Oprah.

With Shopify Plus, the Peepers team built and launched a redesigned site they were actually proud of. The new site includes many of the desired features that weren’t possible on the old platform, like more diverse product views. The team reshot multiple images of each product and updated descriptions quickly and easily. 

Across its checkout experience, once a visitor adds an item to their cart, Peepers displayed a custom free shipping motivator showing how much more the customer had to spend to qualify for free shipping.

They’re also running split tests and experimenting with different accessories offerings, like eyeglass cases and cleaning kits, to optimize upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

With Shopify Plus’ ability to import custom HTML, the Peepers site now offers a seamless, visually consistent experience on the entire website, which has inspired trust and boosted sales.

Results

With the help of Shopify Plus, the new Peepers.com was ready to handle as much traffic as Oprah could throw its way. Peeper’s new site maximized conversions from the Oprah feature and continues to help them grow by attracting more organic traffic. This was one of the company’s key objectives and has resulted in a financial windfall that’s still paying out today.

Not only does the new site attract more visitors, but it’s also significantly better at converting them.  

Organic traffic conversion rates have grown by 25%–30%. The customized checkout played a big role in driving that increase. “Organic traffic was our weak point,” Hart says. “But we never took a huge hit when we switched platforms.” Peepers has also seen a boost in average order value by 15%–20%. The team plans to explore even more of Shopify Plus’ customization capabilities in the coming year.

 By allowing Peepers to customize its checkout experience, Shopify Plus boosted both the company’s conversions and sales. The average order is now about $55. Existing customers generally purchase around three times, meaning CLV is roughly $165. “So new organic traffic is worth its weight in gold,” Hart says. “Customers are responding extremely well.”