Shopify Design, Development, and Administration | Rad Aquatics

Rad Aquatics is a Vancouver-based aquarium/aquascaping supply store with a primary focus on its e-commerce store utilizing Shopify.

📝 This is one of the biggest projects I have worked on and I still work with the client from time to time for smaller projects.

My initial hire was to help with digital design and marketing but later on, I was hired part-time to help with:

• Set up and maintain their Shopify store • Branding • Design the Shopify theme to the desired look and improve the UI/UX • Set up a Company-wide email system with Google Workspace (previously known as Gsuite) • Setup and connect analytic tools & analyze the data with tools such as Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity and Google Search Console • Site-wide speed optimization • Basic SEO, SDM setup • Google My Business setup • Email marketing campaigns with Klaviyo • Set up various store features such as a product reviews system, Loyalty system, Chat system, and more • Copywriting for custom pages and email campaigns • Asset creation for gift cards, banners, events, and special sales, email marketing campaigns, SM posts • Fix various bugs • Run Google ads campaigns • Create a wholesale version of the site for B2B sales

Due to the nature of the size of this project and the list of priorities that the company had, the processes listed here aren’t necessarily done in order. For example, it was far more important for the client to have a working email organization than implementing the branding colors into the e-commerce site at first.

As a designer a brand style guide is a vital tool as it ensures consistency, reinforces brand identity, improves efficiency, facilitates collaboration, supports scalability, and contributes to positive brand perception.

Based on Rad Aquatics’s customers who primarily looking to purchase products to enhance their at-home experiences with nature-like aquascaping and aquarium tanks, the primary color of teal and its shades were selected as it expresses calmness, energy, and trust which will also have a direct effect on customers shopping experience online.

As for typography choices, I chose “Raleway”, a sans-serif font for headings and sub-headings because of its versatility, and legibility.
As for body text, I selected Open Sans another sans-serif font known for its legibility and popularity for web applications due to its lightness in weight since fonts are one of the biggest contributors to web-page loading speeds which can affect customer experience and loss of sales/conversions in the long run.

Based on my suggestion and the client’s preference, we decided on a paid Shopify theme, and with the help of the mood board and the brand style guide, I began designing the theme by creating low-fidelity wireframes of the website on Figma.

📝 Only the homepage mockup is showcased here.

With the help of the mood board, brand style guide, and the building blocks of the store now in place, it was time to add content. This includes graphics, images, and copywriting for pages such as collections, brands, the loyalty system, returns, refund policies, terms of service, contact, and more. While my focus is not on copywriting, upon client’s request, the majority of the written content on Rad Aquatic’s website is done by me which proved to be useful when doing the SEO of the site later on.

📝 Products, collections, and categories were added by the client.

Assets listed below are some of the graphics/images designed throughout the year working with the client. These include sale campaigns, website banners in various sizes, corporate digital brochures, social media posts, email campaigns, illustrations, icons, and more.

In this section, I will briefly go through various projects I did on the backend either requested by the client or suggested by me to help increase conversions, customer retention, lower bounce rates, improve SEO, better workflow for administrative tasks and customer service, and more.

Based on my suggestion to the client, conducting your business communications using a gmail.com email address may not have been a good long-term solution, so one of the first things I did for the client was to set up a variety of professional email address extensions using Radquatics’s domain name. This meant that the client could now operate their business under sales@radaquatics.com or support@radaquatics.com vs sales@personal.gmail.com. There are various third-party email organizations but I decided to go with Google Workspace for reliability and extra features such as extra Google Drive storage, Calendar, and more.

By the end of this project, the client could use their personal email address to access multiple professional inboxes all in one inbox and reply to emails accordingly.

In the long run, this setup will solve other issues such as adding employee emails with specific accesses, general workflow and organization, avoiding spam, credibility, reliability, and more.

While at it, I also designed and set up an email signature for the client that automatically attaches to the bottom of each email they send and reply to.

For brick-and-mortar businesses, It is crucial to have a Google business listing to help ensure local customers find your business to navigate to, and see your open hours, contact info, and reviews for brand credibility. A Google Business Profile also improves your local SEO when people search for a keyword on Google Maps.

Having a Google business listing could also increase the client’s website traffic and vice versa. So using the client’s branding, I created a business listing for the client and wrote a small description to let new customers know what the business is about and also help SEO.

in this step, I basically created and set up analytic tools to analyze the data with tools such as Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity, and Google Search Console.

The data from these tools will prove to be useful in the long run for things like SEO, user experience, search rankings, page indexing, and more.

Aside from competitive analysis, I wrote Radaquatics website metadata to be crawled by various search engines including the title, description utilizing the best practices for keywording using Google’s Keyword Planner tool.

The Keyword planner proved itself useful when writing descriptions for pages such as collections, brands, and certain products. This resulted in Radaquatics showing up on Google’s first page and the top 4 results for certain brands after the supplier’s own website and beating various other competitors which to this day brings in unique visitors when users search for the brand’s name.

Images were also optimized by writing descriptive file names and alt texts, compressing the images for improving page speed, and adding image-destructed data was done throughout the time when the client began adding products to the website.

Other SEO techniques such as writing product and homepage structured data using JSON-LD was implemented for the theme since at the time the selected theme did not automatically offer structured data on pages such as the homepage, products, and collections.

Structured data is very important for SEO as it makes it easier for Google to understand what our pages, products, and website are about.

With the store close to launching, it was time to add certain features that make the storefront more trustworthy and improve the user experience further by allowing the users to write product reviews and contact support via chat. These features are not natively supported by Shopify so with the help of apps, I was able to setup these features for the client while keeping the cost low as manually coding this would end up costing the client more.

Another feature requested by the client was adding a loyalty system, allowing the users to collect points when making purchases, writing product reviews, and more. These points could, later on, be redeemed for discounts, gift cards, and more, rewarding the user at no extra cost and keeping customer retention high.

The loyalty system can also be used for certain campaigns incentivizing the user to collect more points during a special sale, or time therefore increasing sales and conversions.

Loyalty systems can be confusing depending on the complexity, our goal was to create an easy-to-understand system that did not deter the users away, so with that I designed custom icons, and illustrations, and created a custom web page with an FAQ section, explaining to the user how the loyalty system works and answer any questions that may have.

Having a customer base as a new business is one of the biggest challenges you could face and due to the number of emails everyone receives nowadays, sending out articles and sales alone is not convincing enough for the customer to sign up for newsletters and so with the help of the client we were able to offer a small discount to customers signing up which would help kick start the sales and onboarding process for new customers.

While this is something you could do natively in Shopify, one of the problems with sending out a discount code that does not expire is the discount code being distributed online on coupon websites, forums, etc, which may bring in sales, but stop the customers from signing up for the newsletter which is what we would want in the long run.

This is where a marketing platform such as Klaviyo come in handy since on top of marketing tools, they offer unique discount codes with options to expire which creates a sense of urgency for the customer to make a purchase.

Over the year I have set up multiple email campaigns and flows for Radaquatics. Unfortunately, due to confidentiality reasons, I won't be able to share the details but some of the campaigns included the sale events throughout the year, new product arrivals, asking customers to review products after purchase, earning double loyalty point timeline, and more.

With Radaquatic expanding its business into wholesale, the old days of sending a PDF with all your products and wholesale pricing would be time-consuming and not very user-friendly and professional. Based on my suggestion to the client, we created a simple wholesale version of the Radaquatics website under another domain extension and hid the wholesale pricing behind a password-protected gate where the client would manually approve business accounts and have them access the site under a user login and password.

This eliminates the need to manually edit the business brochures regarding wholesale pricing, product availability, and other details and having to send those PDFs bi-weekly/monthly.