Their Story:
It’s not easy to take the leap to pursue your dreams, but that’s exactly what Founder and CEO of ThruNite.com, David Chen did in 2009. Living in South China in a former “world factory” region, David Chen saw an opportunity to use the resources around him and become an expert in LED products.
David Chen’s vision was to bring high quality and affordable LED flashlights to the market. Rather than outsource each part of his business, Chen saw an opportunity to control the entire process. From R&D, manufacturing, sales, and service, to everything in between. Rather than be a B2C (Business to Consumer) company, ThruNite positioned itself as a M2C (Manufacturer to Consumer) company.
Being both a manufacturer and retailer, ThruNite needed an ecommerce platform that had the flexibility of selling to both consumers and businesses. When ThruNite first formed, it chose BigCommerce as its ecommerce platform because of its flexibility.
The Opportunity:
Because ThruNite opened up shop on BigCommerce several years ago, they were still on BigCommerce’s old theming framework, Blueprint. BigCommerce upgraded their platform framework to a more modern, flexible, and future-proof framework, called Stencil, back in 2016. Being on the antiquated framework, Blueprint, ThruNite was losing out on the features that BigCommerce had been releasing for its merchants, which you can read more about here.
Being on Blueprint, which is officially not supported by BigCommerce any more, merchants often begin to experience issues with their store. Features break, functionality doesn’t do what it used to, and even website traffic can begin to suffer.
The Solution – A Custom BigCommerce Design on Stencil
In 2020, David Chen, decided to take another leap of faith and partner with IntuitSolutions to redesign and develop ThruNite.com on BigCommerce’s Stencil framework. Rather than just move over to Stencil with a marketplace theme, ThruNite saw this as an opportunity to stand out from the competition with a custom design, as well as user-experience enhancing add-ons that would make it easier for both their B2C and B2B customers to purchase from their store.
Before we dive into the design and UX add-ons, let’s first shine some light of some of the native features of Stencil:
- Better website performance
- Faster Base Theme Page Speed
- Cleaner Code
- Improved Mobile experience
- Adheres to Google’s Guidelines for Mobile Website Best Practices
- AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) Powered Webpages
- Make More Money
- Access to More Payment Options
- Powerful Marketing Features, such as Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking
ThruNite worked closely with the IntuitSolutions design team to craft a design and layout that uniquely represents their brand.
The Old Design | The New Design |
In addition to the design, our developers implemented several custom add-ons that help to make the shopping experience for ThruNite customers easier. Some of these add-ons include:
- Frequently Bought Together displays a set of products that other customers also bought with the product you are currently viewing. This add-on improves the user experience for BigCommerce stores across industries. It’s a simple way to add sophistication and interactivity to your site.
- Custom Product Page Tabs: Create tabs on your Product Pages, organizing Product information into more readable sections. This highly customized add-on lets you choose the number of tabs and easily fill in and edit the relevant information.
- List View / Grid View: Make comparison shopping easy with Grid or List views on Category and Subcategory pages. It’s a smarter way to organize Category and Subcategory pages, especially if you sell Products with lots of specifications.
- Product Video Thumbnails: This customization automatically pulls the video and displays it alongside your photo thumbnails, allowing the customer to easily access and watch while clicking through the gallery. An example of product video thumbnails can be found here.
- Popup Login Window: Allow Customers to log in to your website without leaving their current page with a simple popup window, bypassing the multi-page login process native to BigCommerce.
The Results:
ThruNite’s newly designed and enhanced BigCommerce Stencil store launched in February 2021. ThruNite was once the dream of a college dropout with the idea for a brand that would “Guide You Through the Night”. As David Chen’s, and the ThruNite team’s, dream has yet again become a reality, we’re grateful that we were able to guide them through the process of migrating from Blueprint to Stencil, just as ThruNite guides their customers through the night.
If you’re still on the BigCommerce Blueprint framework then we encourage you to take the leap and migrate to Stencil. IntuitSolutions is here to guide you through the process each step of the way.
Unsure if your BigCommerce store is Blueprint or Stencil? Learn how to check here.
Want to know more about our blueprint to stencil services? Learn more here, contact us, or give us a call 866 901 4650.
