99 Counties Chapter 4: Why we moved to Shopify after trying to build our own eCommerce platform
Experience is the best teacher
I’m struck by how time and again in this startup journey I am finding that the only way to really learn is through experience and failed experiments. Earlier this year we attempted to build our own eCommerce platform. We had big ambitions and believed that by controlling the technology backend we would be able to more easily build scalable technology to service our farm partners, internal operations and end customers. Boy were we wrong! In fairness to us we did originally plan to use Shopify, but then upon hearing that they had deprecated certain APIs we decided to go it alone. In retrospect this was incredibly stupid and I as CEO take full responsibility for that. Shopify has 4,000 engineers. How on earth were we going to build something even slightly comparably effective with 1-4 engineers? And in the end it turns out that Shopify had built new functionality that made them even better able to service our needs (seems obvious now but I clearly should have pressed harder on their product roadmap).
We did end up building a v1 eCommerce platform that was incredibly impressive considering how small our technology and product team was, however what we quickly realized was that we would never be able to keep up with the litany of issues that customers would have due to different operating systems, plug-ins etc. Shopify and other large full service eCommerce platforms have an army of people dedicated to solving not only this but optimizing for conversion and providing pre-built APIs and negotiated arrangements with a wonderful assortment of partners. Having been through this process, I am 100% confident that the platform we are using is the best for ensuring a great customer experience which is, after all, the most important thing!
So why did we choose Shopify? Simply put because Shopify has the most developer talent and largest partner ecosystem, and are the most well-established and best-funded:
Developer Ecosystem: The web development firm we are working with who we have been incredibly impressed with thus far (Scoutside) are most familiar and adept at working within Shopify. That they were most comfortable with it was certainly a factor – it also suggests that it’s probably the better platform if they’ve decided to commit to it. Additionally, in the future should we need a plug-in for this or to hire a developer for that - there are simply way more plug-ins and developers familiar with Shopify.
Gut Check: Who are you going to bet the company on? I’d rather go with the best funded company (Shopify) with the ability to hire the best talent and the least risk of unforeseen issues.
What compromise did we have to make: weighable items
Another lesson I’ve learned is that there is never a perfect solution or vendor and you certainly can’t wait around until the cows come home for the perfect one to arrive. For 20 years Wallace Farms has charged customers by the exact weight of the product. While that sounds great and most closely resembles the grocery store experience, it makes for a ton of extra work for our operations team and oftentimes a worse customer experience. On our old platform we would charge a customer an approximate amount for a weighable item, then our ops team would have to weigh the item, enter it into our system and send an updated invoice to the customer who thought they had already paid. The transition to Shopify was a good forcing function for us to move on from that system. We now display weight ranges for all our variable weight products. For example Chicken Breasts (shown below) are available in 1 - 1.24lbs, 1.25 - 1.49lbs and 1.5 - 1.75lbs.
The upshot of this is sometimes a customer will get a slightly better value and sometimes a slightly worse value. However, since we are focused on building multi-year relationships with customers, in the long run it will be a wash for both parties. From an operations standpoint it means our ops team can weigh all the items in advance (which is a great time to do quality assurance on the packages and cutting from our processing partners) and sort the packages into different bins for pick and pack. Batched weighing is certainly more efficient than weighing items each time a box is packed and entering it into our system and then sending an invoice to a confused customer.
While there is so much more to share about this decision I need to get back to the 867229 items on my to do list!
How you can support us
I love sharing these granular details about business-building because every time I do, one of you reaches out either to share a similar story, to ask for more detail or to share experiences about how you might have done something that could help create a shortcut for us. Building a business truly takes a village, and I could not be more grateful for you all.
As always if you are passionate about supporting local, regenerative farms and love eating nutrient dense meat please reach out to connect. We are always looking to reach new customers and add great employees to our team. Extra bonus if you are in Chicagoland or Iowa.
PS: We have some incredible Labor Day promotions going on right now at Wallacefarms.com