Full E-commerce Rebuild | Multi-Location Retail on Shopify Plus
Boosting Average Order Value 21% With a Ground-Up Shopify Rebuild
Impact Overview
+21% increase in average order value over the holiday season following the rebuild
+18% increase in conversion rate
-20% reduction in returns
60+ franchise store pages consolidated into one dynamic template
Our Client’s Challenge
Relax The Back runs a national retail business on Shopify Plus. Its large, specialized furniture catalog and a franchise network of 60+ locations was built up over years of growth. That growth outpaced the site's original structure creating:
A fragmented product catalog with duplicate pages and inconsistent variant logic.
60+ franchise store pages, each maintained individually.
An app stack that had grown expensive and unmanageable, with overlapping, redundant tools that still failed to meet business requirements.
Routine updates handled manually, one item at a time.
The Problem’s Business Impact
We built RTB a custom attribution system we call Footprint, that connects digital advertising to in-store sales. It lives entirely inside the client’s own Google Cloud environment.
Here is what we built:
Network-wide changes meant repeating the same work across many pages by hand, allowing for errors and causing excessive duplicative work for the e-commerce management team.
Adding or updating products required one-off builds with no consistent structure.
Multiple years of quick fixes resulted in a site the Marketing team could not update themselves despite no developer resources on hand.
The team spent excess time wrestling with the system instead of growing the business.
The structure was holding back a business that already had a national presence.
Vail Creatives Intervention
We renovated the entire Shopify backend environment across five connected zones, each built to be owned and run by the RTB team without requiring specialized technical skills.
Zone 1: Dynamic Data Layer | Theme agnostic
WHAT: The theme reads the data. It does not hold the data.
HOW: Moved product specs, franchise details, and promotional content out of theme code and into Shopify's native metafields and metaobjects.
WHY: RTB owns its business logic as a structured asset. A rebrand or a theme change no longer means rebuilding that logic from scratch. It reconnects to a new design.
Zone 2: Product Management | Unified Architecture
WHAT: Built a reusable decision framework for every future product: Shopify variants, customization option sets, linked styles, and cross-sell offers.
HOW: Consolidated the catalog into a single dynamic "default-product" template.
Built upgrades and add-ons directly into the product page, so a customer configuring a recliner can add options like massage or heat without leaving the listing.
Set up complementary products as cross-sell offers below the add-to-cart button, so related items like a matching side table or a keyboard tray appear at the point of purchase.
Solved a fulfillment problem using unlisted products, so customization choices pass SKU data straight into orders.
WHY: Customers see the right add-ons and pairings while they are deciding, boosting both AOV and conversion rate.
Every product can carry relevant upgrades and pair with complementary items, and the team builds these offers through the same framework with no development.
Zone 3: Franchise | Simplified Support
WHAT: Created a documented, repeatable process for launching a new location, without the need for technical resources.
HOW: Consolidated 60+ store pages into a single dynamic template driven by metafields.
Built a new store locator, per-store review widgets, and a catalog-request form that routes to the nearest franchise.
WHY: Launching a store is a data-entry task. The team enters hours, phone, photos, and staff bios. The page builds itself. A network-wide change is one edit instead of 60+ edits.
Zone 4: Collections | Single Dynamic Template
WHAT: Created one collection template with dynamic sub-collection cards, promotional cards, and custom filters.
HOW: Centralized product attribute data management into standard Shopify Plus workflows:
Dynamic sub-collection cards for product discovery.
Promotional cards built into the product grid, controlled by the team.
Custom filters (recline type, size, color family) connected to managed data sources.
WHY: No developer resource needed to make rapid changes to the live site. A promotion like "Save $2,000 + 0% Financing" drops into the product grid from the admin panel. No developer, no wait.
Zone 5: Apps | Stack Modernization
WHAT: Recommended lower-cost alternatives and trimmed redundant apps to reduce recurring monthly spend
HOW:
Replaced expensive and dated applications with stronger tools for reviews, store location, and customization
Completed 3rd party payment integration and closed a theme functionality gap
WHY:Fewer tools, lower monthly software spend, and simplified management
Team Enablement
Delivered a comprehensive operation manual that current and future team members use for reference, troubleshooting, and how-to’s across each aspect of store management Trained the team on bulk catalog, collection, and product management unlocking a scalable system and significantly reducing time spent on manual updates.
Upskilled existing team to use dynamic data sources and improved backend architecture so the system works with them and not against.
Developed and documented SOPs for future growth, including adding locations, products, and collections.
In the 6 months since launch, Relax The Back has been Independently operating the site with zero support or additional training any external entity (including Vail Creatives).
Lasting Results
21% increase in average order value over the holiday season following the rebuild
18% increase in conversion rate
20% reduction in returns
120+ franchise pages now run on one template — a network-wide change is a single edit
A system built to scale, managed and extended by RTB's own team
Client Testimonial
“The biggest shift isn’t just the time saved on any one task, it’s that our site finally has documented, consistent architecture instead of something built up piecemeal over years. Day to day site management went from reactive firefighting to something I can actually stay ahead of.”
