Matching Customizable Products With A Shopping Experience That Feels Made-To-Order
To the team at CritterGear, a small business specializing in handmade pet products, it’s important that their brand, toys, and accessories make pets (and their owners!) feel unique and special—a challenge their existing online presence was not able to fully meet.
Needing a major, modern facelift for their eCommerce site, they came to Altos to elevate the look and feel of their brand. To meet this challenge, we built a user-friendly online shopping experience that can handle hundreds of product iterations while still feeling personalized.
Giving A Successful Homegrown Brand The Modern Look It Deserves
A new site launch is the perfect opportunity to reinforce a thriving brand. To that end, we wanted CritterGear’s new site to herald a revitalized brand with an appearance that truly matched their status as a top New England retailer—and looked as fun as the products they make.
We curated a vivid new color palette for the brand and leaned on vibrant, colorful blocks to serve a striking introduction to the upgraded CritterGear. Contrasted against these bold blue backdrops, our stark white custom illustrations put the company’s products on playful display, while a new selection of typefaces keeps the experience friendly and encouraging.
Showcasing Countless Options Using Custom Solutions
CritterGear offers something most other brands in their space simply can’t match: customizability. Customers come to CritterGear for their handmade pet collars, leashes, and toys, each available in several different sizes, colors, and patterns—a whopping 300+ different combinations.
We knew that this was a feature we not only needed to accommodate, but needed to highlight… and make as easy for customers to access and engage with as possible. Our developers tackled the challenge of incorporating these hundreds of options using a WooCommerce-based system—all without adding dropdown menus that scroll to no tomorrow.
For the sake of a polished product selection system, we needed to work against the conventions of the plugin without sacrificing an optimized performance. Starting from a CSV file that served as the single source of truth for the entire CritterGear product line, we crafted a custom PHP script capable of importing the information and translating it into a seamless, multi-step product page.
The finished product is something completely different from what you’d expect from WooCommerce: a triple-tiered product builder that allows users to easily select their desired size, pattern, and quantity on a single page.
Keeping The Product Selection Process Fun From Start To Finish
Scrolling through a collection of options this large had all the potential to be a pain point for customers. However, breaking the ordering process into three simple steps means that users spend less time trying to find what they need and more time feeling good about their new purchase.
Users start by choosing the right product for their pet. After selecting their pet’s size, then comes the fun part: navigating through hundreds of styles to find their favorite. Thanks to pattern and color filters we built on the left-hand side of the page, users can quickly narrow down the broad selection to their preferred color and pattern. Pick a pattern, review order details, select order quantities, and voilà: your custom pet accessory is ready for check-out.
