Bear Ecommerce
A robust e-commerce storefront built for scalability, featuring advanced product filtering, cart management, and secure payments.
Project Info
Year
2023
Platform
Headless Commerce
Industry
Retail / FMCG
Services
- Headless Architecture
- Shopify Dev
- SEO Strategy
Tech Stack
100%
Lighthouse Score
0.2s
Load Time
The Challenge
Bear, a niche craft beer distributor, hit the ceiling of their Shopify template. As their inventory grew to thousands of SKUs with complex attributes (ABV, IBU, Origin, Hops), customers found it impossible to browse effectively. SEO performance was stagnant because the purely client-side rendering of the previous store wasn't being indexed correctly by search engines. The page load speeds were hurting their Google Ads Quality Score, effectively burning ad spend without results.
Our Solution
We executed a "Headless Commerce" migration. We kept Shopify as the robust backend for inventory and payment processing but built a custom frontend using Next.js. This gave us total control over the URL structure and metadata, perfectly optimizing for "long-tail" beer keywords. We integrated Algolia for instant, typo-tolerant search and faceted filtering (e.g., "IPA under 6% ABV from Vermont"). The UI features an "Age-Gate" that transitions smoothly into a warm, rustic aesthetic using warm colors and textured paper backgrounds, separating it from cold, generic stores.
Key Features
- Headless Shopify Integration
- Algolia Search Implementation
- Multi-currency Support
- One-page Checkout
The Result
Organic traffic increased by 140% within 3 months, with the site ranking #1 for localized craft beer terms. The Algolia integration led to a 15% increase in average cart value, as users could finally find complementary products easily. The "Beer Matchmaker" quiz we built has a 65% completion rate, driving significant personalized sales.