Tropicfeel

The main goal of the business was to increase the conversion rate, but as the Tropicfeel development partner, we were responsible only for the tech part of the project. After research we defined the three main goals that would contribute to increasing the Tropicfeel conversion rate:

• Creation of a design system
• Usability improvement
• Increase of the website speed across all devices

Another important task was implementing new functionality into the Tropicfeel Shopify theme, like the cookie acceptance popup or the multilanguage support.

We started the work by learning every detail about the Tropicfeel ecosystem — it’s impossible to build great functionality without a deep understanding of the specifics of the client’s business and how it operates.

Then our UX/UI designer conducted an audit of the existing Tropicfeel website and highlighted all errors that significantly decreased the store’s usability, confused customers, and lowered conversion rates. The client approved the suggested UX/UI improvements, and we implemented them later during the development.

The old Tropicfeel theme didn’t have a design system. When a design system is implemented into the website, its management is quick and effective — if an element is changed in one place, it is automatically changed everywhere. When there is no design system at all, developers have to manually change each required element everywhere on the website, which takes a lot of time and is very expensive.

To implement the design system, we used Bootstrap — it already had some pre-installed elements, which helped us increase quality and do the task faster.

Alongside conducting a UX/UI audit, we started implementing new functionality into the Tropicfeel store. But the more we were working with the existing theme, the more problems we encountered along the way. The development that had been previously done for Tropicfeel was of very low quality, and it didn’t correspond to any software quality standards — even some basic things like proper code structure had not been implemented.

This led to two main project challenges. First, implementing any functionality to the already existing messed-up code required enormous time and mainly consisted of bug-fixing. Second, it was impossible to predict and adequately estimate the development work on the project because of these constantly emerging bugs.

Keeping in mind the roadmap with all the functionality needed to be implemented, the project cost would skyrocket and the final result would be unstable and of very poor quality.

Here at SpurIT, we have high development standards, so we simply couldn’t put up with the situation. We prepared a detailed technical report on the current state of the theme, outlined the bloated cost of its current and future technical maintenance, and suggested the client build a new custom theme from scratch.

For Tropicfeel, the development of a custom theme would be the best and most cost-effective solution due to several reasons:

• There were a lot of untypical elements in the Tropicfeel store, and implementing them into a ready-made theme would cost the same as creating a new one from scratch, but while doing so, we would face the limitations of a ready-made theme
• One of the project goals was to increase the website’s speed load, and custom themes have much higher speed load rates
• In the future, the cost of implementing any new functionality would be much lower due to the high-quality code and well-designed theme architecture of a custom theme; they would also be implemented much faster

The client opted for the custom theme, but at the same time, we also needed to implement some of the most required functionality into the existing Tropicfeel store. This was needed to ensure the proper work of the business while the new theme was being created.