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Bulk Nutrients Strengthens Ecommerce Muscles Using BigCommerce
Discover how customizable, cost-effective and reliable BigCommerce is and why we built it that way.
326%
increase in users****** (May 2015 to July 2022)
52%
increase in conversion rate** (June 2015 to June 2022)
2,892%
increase in SEO organic keyword growth** (May 2015 to August 2022)
Performance metrics compare dates listed above.
Building a healthy business
Ben Crowley, founder and owner of Bulk Nutrients and Southern Nutrition, started his supplement business under the name Bioflex in 2008. Becoming a business owner at 25 started rather modestly — from a room in his home blending and bagging protein powder for resale.
Years passed and the digitally native business grew. Today Bulk Nutrients is the largest direct to customer supplement supplier in Australia which operates from a 32k+ square-foot, state of the art, restored apple shed in the beautiful Huon Valley of Tasmania, Australia.
Southern Nutrition is a B2B website, but the majority of the action is with Bulk Nutrients. “Bulk Nutrients is where we really leveraged BigCommerce to go gangbusters. It accounts for almost all of our revenue,” said Webmaster Jarod Pulo of Bulk Nutrients.
CHALLENGE
A need for strength and flexibility
For close to seven years, Bulk Nutrients endured two ecommerce platforms that didn’t meet its standards for growth and flexibility. “We were on Business Catalyst for four years and the back end was clunky, not streamlined like we discovered BigCommerce to be,” Jarod said. “Our next system, Neto, we were on for nearly three years. It was acceptable, but not brilliant. It filled the gap of being a lot more usable in the back end, but it still had severe limitations.”
Between the two platforms, Bulk Nutrients found its ecommerce solutions lacking in website performance, scalability and native functionality, design and template architecture and third-party integrations for things such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), accounting and marketing.
“Bulk Nutrients is where we really leveraged BigCommerce to go gangbusters. It accounts for almost all of our revenue.”
jarod pulo webmaster, bulk nutrients
SOLUTION
BigCommerce: Just right
Bulk Nutrients’ search for a new ecommerce platform can be likened to the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Magento was too big and clunky while Shopify was too small and couldn’t scale. But it was BigCommerce that proved to be just right for the supplement manufacturing company. And here are several reasons why:
The templates used at that time were far superior and helped with SEO
Large and expanding ecosystem of integrations and plugins facilitated plug and play
Scalability of platform
Value for money
Vastly improved responsive design for mobile devices
Local partners supported migration and enhanced end user experience
Bulk Nutrients got an SEO bump when it launched on BigCommerce in mid-2015 using BigCommerce’s Handlebar template and then later Stencil. “I manage SEO for the company, and both the Handlebar and Stencil out-of-the box templates were brilliant in terms of SEO. We just did the customization to them, and then the SEO pretty much took care of itself,” Jarod said.
In December 2021, Bulk Nutrients advanced its ecommerce function and capabilities when it transitioned from a templatized architecture to an API-driven headless one.
“BigCommerce’s APIs power our headless site. This gives us the benefit of leveraging the platform and BigCommerce’s APIs to deliver the best front-end customer experience. All of our rest APIs and GraphQL functions power the front end, or they power our Sanity back end,” Jarod said. “So we've got serverless functions doing calls to BigCommerce to populate the CMS as well as serverless functions for cart updates for end users."
Notable Applications: Comments by: Jarod Pulo, Bulk Nutrients webmaster
“I love Klaviyo. I can't speak highly enough of it. The power of Klaviyo is its segmentation, which allows us to identify customers that have purchased a specific product and then market to them new products they might have an interest in.”
“Zendesk powers our customer service via phone, chat or email. It's all about the efficiency of chatting to customers and making the customer service experience as good as possible for them in the least amount of time possible for us.”
Technical Features:
****Content Management System (CMS)
Sanity (customized)
Product Information Management (PIM)
Solutions Architect
Customer Success Manager
“BigCommerce’s APIs power our headless site. This gives us the benefit of leveraging the platform and BigCommerce’s APIs to deliver the best front-end customer experience.”
Jarod Pulo, Webmaster, bulk nutrients
RESULTS
Flexing its ecommerce muscle
“The time it takes to update products, categories and the like, is much quicker and far easier since launching on BigCommerce. We’re able to spend more time testing to see what works for customers, and less time doing mundane tasks on the back end,” Jarod said. “In 2021, BigCommerce was also extremely reliable for us with a 99.98% uptime for the entire calendar year.”
Based on metrics it appears customers are responding to Bulk Nutrients outreach strategies. The company saw a four-fold increase (326%) in monthly users between May 2015 to July 2022, and a 52% increase in its conversion rate from June 2015 through June 2022.
“The SEO tools, including previous themes we’ve used, within BigCommerce allowed our store to grow keywords from approximately 1,600 at launch in May 2015 to nearly 50,000 in August 2022,” Jarod said. “That’s a 2,892% increase!”
“The time it takes to update products, categories and the like, is much quicker and far easier since launching on BigCommerce.”
jarod pulo Webmaster, bulk nutrients
LOOKING AHEAD
Enhancements for customers and company
In the not-so-distant future, Bulk Nutrients plans to roll out a custom checkout to enhance its buyers’ shopping experience. “We’ll make the best use of BigCommerce’s native features and third-party integrations to build a world-class website that serves the mutual needs of our customers and our company,” Jarod said.
Published: December 2022
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