Eastside Co

Award-winning web design and marketing agency Eastside Co is one of the world’s most experienced Shopify Plus Partners. Established in 2012, ESC has helped hundreds of aspirational brands and internationally-renowned names including Carex, Ford, and Chelsea FC exceed their goals thanks to world-class ecommerce solutions.

From beautifully designed, intuitive online stores, to results-driven marketing strategies and best-in-class applications, Eastside Co’s 70-strong team of specialists across UX, design, development, marketing, and client services work with online businesses to achieve success.

Interview with Louis Thompson, CMO at Eastside Co

Louis explains what sets Eastside Co apart from other agencies, why they decided to partner with Klevu, and advice for someone looking to migrate to Shopify. 

Tell us about Eastside Co?

Award-winning ecommerce agency Eastside Co is one of the world’s most experienced Shopify Plus Partners. Established in 2012, ESC has helped hundreds of aspirational brands and internationally-renowned names including Carex, Wild Deodorant, Absolute Collagen, and Chelsea FC exceed their goals thanks to world-class ecommerce solutions and ‘performance thinking’.

From beautifully designed, intuitive online stores, to results-driven marketing strategies and best-in-class applications, Eastside Co’s 100-strong team of specialists across UX, design, development, marketing, and client services work with online businesses to achieve success. 

See some of our agency’s work here.

What sets you apart from other digital agencies? 

Eastside takes a strategic approach for all of our clients. What that really means is we aren’t just building a website, or executing marketing. We actively collaborate with our clients to understand their business goals and build a robust strategy designed to facilitate success across a whole range of metrics. Eastside Co has built a team of specialists covering every area of ecommerce, which means, as an agency, we can offer our clients a one-stop shop for all of their ecommerce needs across design, development, marketing, and app development.

What would you say to someone looking to migrate to Shopify?

Shopify is a viable solution for almost every ecommerce business, from lean startups to established enterprise businesses. The biggest consideration for a business replatforming is mitigating the risk on a handful of key metrics, the most important of which is probably organic traffic/rankings and conversion rate. Ensuring you have a solid migration strategy and solid thinking in terms of site structure and UX are vital to a successful replatform.

It’s also an opportunity to consider your whole tech stack and tech patterns. This could be reviewing your WMS/ ERP as well as your front-facing tech for everything from search and customer service to reviews and CRM. Shopify plugs and plays incredibly well with some of the best tech available in ecommerce, so utilise what you can.

What are the benefits of Shopify Plus?

The biggest consideration for most brands when choosing between a standard Shopify plan and Shopify Plus is usually a commercial one. When your revenue reaches a certain level, it makes financial sense to switch to Shopify Plus because the reduced transaction costs cover the cost of the Plus subscription.

There may be occasions where your functional needs require a Shopify Plus subscription, especially if you need to make significant changes to the checkout.

For brands trading internationally that want to deliver a truly localised experience, Shopify Plus also offers up to 9 additional stores under a single plan, so you can have individual stores for each region with separate base currencies and languages.

Why do you think product discovery is important to your client base?

Product discovery is vital for every ecommerce merchant. Customers browse sites in a number of different ways so ensuring your merchandising strategy and on-site search are easy to use and effective should be a key consideration for any ecommerce site. When you combine this functionality with behaviour-based personalisation, the opportunity to increase conversion rate and average order value is incredible.

Why did you decide to partner with Klevu? 

As well as being developer-friendly from an integration point of view, Klevu’s tech also provides solutions to all of the important elements of product discovery outlined above. Being able to leverage their tech while having full flexibility on the design and development of the site makes them an unparalleled partner.

Why did you decide to implement Klevu for Purish?

We decided to implement Klevu for Purish as they needed an advanced search solution that was also aesthetically pleasing due to their customers being very visual. It was also important that the backend was easy to use for a small ecommerce team and we knew Klevu could provide this. 

If your agency had a theme tune, what would it be?

Flash Gordon Theme Tune!