Bixby Chocolate

Scott has brought our business to the next level and from start to finish, he makes the process very fun, but challenging and it's worth all the effort. Good morning. uh, my name is Kate MCIR and I'm owner and founder of Bixby chocolate. We are a chocolate manufacturing company based in Rockland Maine. We make delicious, uh, chocolate products anywhere from our beer, brittle to chocolate lobsters to sea salted caramels. Um, we make a variety of delicious, yummy, um, gluten free, mostly gluten free and vegan and organic chocolates. I am begrudgingly the it tech person , which is really not my forte. We historically had a WordPress website, um, back in the day, and it was really, uh, not user friendly in the sense, like it just seemed to need to have a lot of like very specific, uh, coding and skill set. Whereas the Shopify, it was very user friendly.

I created the first version myself and managed it all. Um, and then Scott helped us go to the next level within Shopify, which was far beyond my lay person's expertise. Sure. So he was a referral through a business coach named Emily Page. Emily is amazing, but she definitely kind of told us some really hard feedback, which was your website stinks. we already knew that , that was not something we weren't aware of. But Emily had said, if you wanna grow your website business, you need to get a web, um, person to help you. And Scott was her number one referral. So I met with Scott and, um, he just already knew what to do. So I think he just really saw the need and the vision cuz he's that's his forte and, um, helped execute it tremendously. And I, I think that's what I love about Scott.

He's not like working with billion dollar brands, brands, he's helping smaller companies, which is so great because you might argue, we need the most help he just took a lot of time. Um, and it was not pressurizing at all in the sense of like trying to understand the needs. And also our company name is BBY and company, uh, officially Emily and Scott were really, no one knows what that means. And you gotta put the word chocolate in there. You know, we had to kind of do a bit of a rebrand. It's hard. It's hard to get to the next levels. Oh, oh, that that's a really great point. Yes. He, he definitely, uh, kicked us out of the bird's nest and said you cannot be using MailChimp any longer. And he set up a whole drip campaign on Clavio, which is still like magical. I have an aunt who is an amazing supporter and fan. She was starting to get these emails that she thought were, I, you know, Kate was writing to work and it was the Clavio drip campaign. One of the emails started with, Hey Nancy, every time she got that email, she wrote me back and said, Hey, it's for horses. Don't write that. and it was converting people expertly without, without it being pushy, I don't even know what you call that marketing working. Oh yeah. Yeah. He forced, he was like, go sign up for Clavio. And I was just like, Scott that's expensive.

It's like $150 a month and he was like, do it. So I did it. And, and so yeah, it does. Well, I, I find reviews to be an uncomfortable part of this new world. We'll call it. And I know how important reviews are. I was nervous to ask people to do reviews. It felt like a big ask, but people seemed to love to do it. So he set that up and then did it in such a way that it was really helpful. So Scott is phenomenal from start to finish. He helps you, uh, navigate through, um, you know, the whitewater rapids of trying to get your website to the next level. And, um, he's definitely a fantastic resource for getting your website to the next level. All right, Scott, thank you so much. You're the best love working with you. Thanks for everything you've done and do.

Hey, Scott Austin hair from Jane Puma. And in this video, I'm going to walk you through the store redesign that I did for Bixby chocolate. So Bixby chocolate was already on Shopify and had just done a brand redesign project where they define their colors, their styles, their fonts, logos, all that good stuff, and wanting to incorporate that into their store and also work on making their store a better shopping experience. So I use the flex seam, which I use for most of my projects on this one and taking the branding guidelines. And the, I love when a client comes to me with good documentation for their brand guidelines, because it just makes things easier to implement. And they have this really strong blue and red color that I call it sailing colors. And you know, we've got the dark blue, the light blue and the red, and they really go together really well. But I got to put that throughout and you'll see, you know, we have a very dominant blue field for this site. So let's walk into the shopping spritz a little bit. And, you know, to start off with, in our header is all about buying, buying, buying right shop, shop, shop. There's no about us. There's no, here's our story. There's no contact us in the header. Let's keep that nice and focused on the shopping experience. And what we're doing is we're giving our customers many different ways to enter their shopping experience so they could shop by what type of chocolate they want or what their dietary needs are or what holiday they're shopping for. And all of these entry points lead to the same set of products. It's just different ways to start your shopping experience and then make decisions as you go down the phone. So for example, let's just walk into dietary. If someone was interested in gluten-free products, we allow them to see all of the gluten-free products. And when we do it, a lot of times you saw one at the dietary link is this is a list of collection pages, right? We don't just drop them into a collection. We say, Hey, you've told us one thing dietary. Now what about dietary needs is important to you? Do you want gluten-free? Do you want vegan? Do you want kosher, let us know that next decision. And then at that point, we'll show you the products that are compatible with that. And what we do on each of these collection pages is we also have the the flex themes filtering on the sidebar here so that, you know, they said, Hey, I want kosher, but maybe they also want to say, well, I'm looking for something with peanut butter also. So they could click here on the peanut butter as the flavor ingredients see, oh, there's one product that is meat meets my needs of gluten-free and peanut flavored. So if we walk into a, one of the products here on the product page, what you'll see is we're using judge me for reviews and a judge me, they did not have a review app in the store when we first started this project. And I think now we already over 400 reviews, which is absolutely fabulous. I added the judge, me app to the store and then went out and solicited reviews from all their past customers look the past six months. And a lot of them responded and that, that gave us great content, right? So if you look down here and the reviews, we've got tons of great content when Marie talks about what they like about the products, which is, which is really useful. And then we're aligning to buying different sizes. Of course, you know, there's variance here. And then we bring in our product seals and we have a wide variety of product seals based on different criteria about the product. So this one is gluten free, but that's how we started our shopping experience. We're looking for something gluten-free, we're reinforcing that right here with that product seal and a Bixby is out of Maine and their, their main routes are very, they're very proud of that. And then they stand in that a lot. So instead of just saying, made in America or made in USA, we're actually seeing maiden mean they value prop. That's very important to them is how they source their products and the ethically source. So we have a product seal for that, and this product also happens to be kosher. So there's a product seal for that, but there's a whole bunch of if then statements in this product seal a section in the theme that puts the right seals on for any given products. I'm just going to randomly pick another product and see if we see some different products seals. Yeah. So here you can see now this one is GMO free and that also shows up in the product seals. And then as we scroll down the page a little bit more, we've got a product description. This one actually has a video inside of it. I'm a huge fan of videos on the product page. If you have relevant videos. And then we have the product in cornea, which is standardized for each one of these pages to be the shipping packaging and returns. And we're just pulling that content straight from the policy pages in the, in the legal settings inside of Shopify. And then we've already talked about the reviews. That's what our product pages look like. And most of the navigation here is going to be, you know, click a main level NAB element, see a list of collection pages from that. You're going to see a collection page. You can refine your choices from there. And then when you click on a product, you'll see the product. And this one here has a lot of product seals, including, you know, where the chocolate is sourced from. This one happens to be from Dom rep. So all, a lot of good information in there, and that's, that's the shopping experience. We can add a product to the cart. Now the interesting thing for a Bixby is that they only shipped from Monday to Wednesday because they're shipping chocolate, right? And especially during summertime, but even when it's not the summertime, they have a, they need to get that product shipped out within a couple of days, time, they just can't ship it. You know, the slow shipping rate, they've got to do a two day shipping so that it doesn't melt and, and you know, it's fresh. There's no preservatives in their products and all that stuff. So right here we put in some messaging, Hey, we only ship Monday to Wednesday. Each week. Orders placed after 10:00 AM on Wednesday will be processed the following Monday. So we're making it very clear to people what the shipping process is. We also put in some texts here about some local pickup orders. And then we also have in this cart, a little module we added for upselling people or cross selling is more accurate way to say is, do they want to add a card to their product? Because most people are buying chocolates as gifts. So this allows them to say, yeah, I'd like to add a card and then they can see all the different card options they have like, oh, this one's, this was nice. I liked the little light house. Let me add that to the cart also. So we added this little cart, you know, cross sell elements to help increase the average order value right now, if we go back to our homepage, right. And let's, let's look at the top now, popular is obvious what that's all about chocolate, you know, there's all different types of chocolate. And here's the thing on this page here. We don't really explain what these different types of chocolates are, right? We have photos to help you understand the differences between them but not everybody's going to know what a Needham is. So we also did this when we built a buyer's guide and that's right over here and the buyer's guide takes all those top level chocolate categories and gives you a little explanation about what each one is. So if you didn't know it, a Needham is made of coconut and creamy potato dipped in dark chocolate. Which sounds kind of interesting, right? But here, people get to learn a little bit about the different types of chocolate that are available to them and other products. And then as they're more educated, they can make the right decision. And the beautiful thing is, as we started putting together this content page and other content pages, I'm going to show you is that content becomes really valuable during, you know, the customer's being on the site, but it also became content that, that we could rent then reuse on social posts. And in emails, we added a Klaviyo for email to this store, but we could have, you know, a email that say, you know, like, imagine your abandoned cart email, one of the emails might be not sure what to get. We'll check out our buyer's guide and, you know, learn about all of our different types of chocolate. So building out these content pages, we can use that content in the emails. And we could also use the pages as destinations to point people to, instead of just saying, go back to your cart or buy now, or, or check out a product. So it gives us a lot more variety in a more authentic experience for customers and the rest of our, our NAB, right? It's just snacks is important, Ghana category for them. So we give it a quick way to get into that. And then we get into gifts and gifts. What we're doing is we're dividing it by the gift scenario. So anniversary, birthday wedding, or for any occasion. And we also allow people to shop by price because we have found that shop by price is important when giving a gift cause people in their mind were like, oh, it's my niece's birthday. She's worth 30 bucks. All right, let's go to the 30 to $50 category and find something for our niece. And then we do the same thing for holiday. Well, let's go back a second on each of these gifts sets, right? So now we have is we have a page built around wedding and it's themed wedding, right? We've got wedding photography going on when we show products that are appropriate for weddings. And once again, this becomes a landing page that we can use in our advertising or social promotions and in our emails. And then we did the same thing for all the holidays. So here's the holidays that are important for Bixby throughout the year. And right now, as I'm recording this it's October. So Halloween is their next holiday coming up. If we click on that, you can see we've got this Halloween theme page, and they've also got Halloween theme products listed on that page. So now as they're, you know, posting on Instagram, for example, you know, one of their fun, little pumpkin Carmel products here, they could point to this page and that gives them a more authentic feel instead of dropping it into a product page, say, Hey, see all of our gifts for Halloween. And as I said before, they're from Maine and they're, they have some main theme products, which are really fun. Customers love the lobsters. There's also some puffiness here yet. Here's some puffins. So we made a page for just the main products, which are main characters and also things that are using main ingredients like this one has blueberries and this one has apple cider and honey. So the customers actually love this stuff. So we made, we made a page just for that. The dietary one we showed you already buyer's guide. We showed you and then corporate gifting. There's a lot of people that are using chocolates. Imagine you're a law firm and you want to give all your clients a gift for holiday. You can come here and, you know, buy boxes of chocolate to give to your clients and make them, they make wonderful gifts for that purpose. So here they explain the different types of products they have. There's a contact form at the top, the different types of products they have with photos. So people can really start imagining what this would look like for them. So that's our shopping experience. And let's go down to our footer and show you some of the content pages we built out. Also, I'm a huge believer in story and Bixby has a wonderful story. So Bixby is owned by Kate and Kate works with her mom Donna in, in running the business and they've got this Kate's a really nice person. She comes across really well and really well spoken, really a friendly, approachable person in the video. And they're at 125 year old building on the main waterfront. So her telling the story here is absolutely fabulous, right? So I love the fact that I think every store and every company and every brand has a story and we just have to tell it. And Kate and Don are doing a really good job here in telling their story to see of content here and awards and all sorts of things they've done. And remember, before I started with that product seal about ethically source, their process and how they make their chocolates is very important to them. So here we have a page that is dedicated to explaining all of that and how they source the chocolate, how they make the chocolate from bean to bar and their, their values and all that good stuff. And that's here on this page. And then we built out a page of all the press, because they'd been around for a few years, we've gotten a lot of good press, some national known publications. So that was really good stuff to put in there. And then of course, they've got a blog with lots and lots of content, but we did, we divided it up into two blogs. So there's the normal blog with articles and here's the second blog for recipes. So the, you know, one of the things they do from a content marketing standpoint is they'll make recipes using their chocolates. This is using their, their bittersweet baking chips. So, you know, now there's a content page built out as a destination for that. We've also talked about once they get enough recipes together, actually making a recipe book and having that as a PDF you know, download file and making that the incentive for email signups and things like that. And then they've got the all reviews page, which we'll scroll on forever. So I won't scroll on it too much, but as I said, they've got over 400 reviews. And quickly I've gotten a couple of hundred by just going to their past customers. You were super happy with the products. But you know, I, I love customer reviews because your customers will say things about your products that you can't say. Cause it would sound like bragging if you said it yourself, but it's great to see when customers are super enthusiastic about your product and and, and share that with others. Let's go this page for a second score on the bottom, because the other page that we have, so there's policy pages. And we also did an accessibility page, which is not a standard policy page in Shopify, right? We had the standard, you know, privacy policy page, nicely formatted here. We also built out an accessibility one because we have an accessibility app that we added. That's becoming more important for stores. And, you know, Kate, the owner of Bixby was, you know, really want it to be open and giving everybody access. So we added an accessibility app which is really nice and corporate gifting. We already showed from the header. That was important enough. We put it in the footer. Also. We also have a couple of other signup type pages. One is wholesale. So people who want to do a wholesale business and, and there's lots of wholesalers for this store, people are, you know, reselling it and retail fundraising. This is an important business model for them. And that's when, you know, a school gets together and buys the chocolates and then goes out and sells them to, you know, their friends and family and that type of stuff. And they get a share of that money. And then here we have a store finder, you know, as I mentioned before that they have a lot of wholesale relationships and you can see here once again, there's some national brands there and some local brands also, but this is some nice, you know, social proof of the quality of their products. If it's in all of these stores and then we've got a contact us page, you know, the normal contact form. And then we also show, Hey, they, they are actually in Maine right there on the waterfront. And if we look at the FAQ, you know, we've got this nice accordion functionality for FAQ going on here with some, you know, good questions and answers happening. So that's, you know, the shopping experience and it's also the content pages. And I don't think we actually went through the homepage here. So on the homepage, we've got this big banner. And what I like with the main homepage banner is it's not about selling the product. It's about, I call it the, you are here sign, right? So what we're doing here is we're letting customers know what the site Bixby code.com, which has got this logo up here, Bixby chocolate, what it is, well, this is chocolates made with a conscience. So if you were looking for the Bixby tennis racket site, you realize you're on the wrong page or the wrong site, right? This is for chocolate. So all we're saying is, Hey, this is about chocolates that are made with a conscience, which, you know, kind of implies high quality. And then we list some popping into categories, some favorite products. We dosed social proof with some of the national brands that are selling in their stores. We do more social proof with the judge, me review carousel. And then we explain, you know, we, we take them in where they can learn more about the story. So from this one here, they can learn about the process here. We showed a nice little video of and this one's on autoplay and is actually, auto-playing here. As you can see. And this one lets them see, you know, just just a little bit, they can turn on the bonds. They want to listen to it. And then we've got some store level products, seals that are, you know, the top level ones for this business. And then we've got an Instagram feed. And this was a, I think it's the covet picks app. This is their free level, which gives you access to a homepage section to use for the Instagram is integration and then we're using Klaviyo. So this is a Klayvio form that we've just embedded into the Shopify store. And we also have Cleevio popups that show up for email, sign up also on exit intent, but I've already closed that one down. So you won't see it as, as I, you know, do the exit and 10 action up here. And then in our footer, we've got that, you know, that blue is, as I mentioned, right, we've got this big, bold blue everywhere. And because that's so dominant, right. What we did with the credit card or payment types is we just grade them out. So instead of having all these other colors down here and it's kind of, you know, confusing and too bright, we just said, let's just all mute them all, make them all nice and gray scale. So they blend into the, into the foreground a little bit, but not, not trying to dominate the space at all. They're just there to reassure people that there's all sorts of payment that we accept, but those colors, you know, the natural colors that come on, those, you know, we muted them out into a gray scale. So they don't confuse and clutter this experience here. And what we also, you saw a couple of times you were scrolling through it's. I think it's on this page here, for example. Yeah. So we've got this nice little element that we made, you know, a little bit of branding where we got the chocolate overlapping and the end of this, the sea scrolling, you know, the sea, the sea scrolls or whatever you want to call this effect of the waves. Which is really nice. And it, that really looks good. That's good here on the desktop, but it looks even better on mobile. Let's just refresh that page. Oh, we're not showing it on mobile on this page and see another, see if I got any shown on another page on mobile. Oh, it must. Must've turned it off on, on mobile. All right. I want you to how great it looks on mobile because we're not shorter on mobile right now. Because in the flex team, we have the ability to turn different elements on or off for desktop and mobile, which is really handy. And for whatever purpose we've turned it off in, in this, in this store for now. So that is the big speed chocolate. There was our exit intent pop-up that was our big speech chocolate store redesign that we did check it out. I'm really happy with how it's turned out. And I think it's a beautiful looking site. Thanks a lot.