Just Sunnies Uses Composable Commerce to Accelerate Sales

SOLUTION

Creating the tech stack they wanted on BigCommerce.

“BigCommerce really made sense for what we were trying to achieve ,” Brukner explained. “The infrastructure was there, the security was great, but the main thing for us was all the different apps and programs that work with it. It makes everything so easy.” 

Going headless for flexibility and speed.

In order to support their growth and scalability, Just Sunnies uses a modern headless “jamstack” architecture deployed onto a serverless environment. To achieve their desired front-end experience, logistics, and warehouse management goals, they use BigCommerce to support their core infrastructure, then adopt the react framework to utilize API microservices, such as Prismic, PeopleVOX, and AWS to support any additional features.

“Having a headless, composable tech stack was really important to us,” said Brukner. “Since the business started, we’ve had web developers in-house to make sure everything is built exactly the way we want it. When we moved to a new solution, we wanted to maintain that level  of control. 

“With a headless, composable system like the one we have on BigCommerce, you can basically just plug and play, pull things in and out, and create our site exactly the way we want,” she continued. 

Prioritizing customer experience.

As they always have, digital innovation and user experience remain a core focus for Just Sunnies. The marketing and web development teams are dedicated to continue improving the customer journey across each touchpoint, and with their composable tech stack, they can implement new and innovative features across their website using a unique mix of external tools and custom-built front-end solutions. 

Creating a progressive web application (PWA).

In order to create a better mobile and desktop user experience, the Just Sunnies team developed a PWA that supports speed and scalability using a React front-end. They implemented Next.js to incorporate “incremental static regeneration,” which retains the performance benefits of static pages, and is scalable to their catalog of over 13,000 products.

“This is just one of the many advantages we’ve seen using our new headless architecture. Across the board we’re seeing better speed, flexibility, usability, and excellent cross-platform support,” Brukner explained. 

Meeting customer needs quickly.

One of the biggest recent projects Just Sunnies has undertaken is the launch of Just Sunnies Optical, a technology that allows customers to personalize almost any pair of sunglasses with their optical prescriptions online. 

“We got a lot of feedback from our customers requesting to add optical scripts to their frames,” Hutchesson said. “We knew it was something that our customers wanted, so we created a roadmap for it and here we are. BigCommerce made it easy.” 

To create this new experience, Just Sunnies built a customized checkout experience, which is hosted on an easy-to-use draw-bag interface. After a customer inputs their prescription information during checkout, Just Sunnies arranges for the frames to be fitted with their custom lenses, then ships them using quick, competitive shipping methods. Their customers generally have their custom optical eyewear with 7-10 business days. 

“This has really allowed us to become a one-stop shop for all things eyewear, offering the largest range of prescription sunglasses and frames online in Australia,” explained Hutchesson. 

“We are and always have been committed to enhancing customer experience. The introduction of our optical branch is just one example of how we're achieving this goal with BigCommerce capabilities to store customer data and product functionality,” Brukner said. 

Optimizing their tech stack with a large partner network.

While Just Sunnies does retain web developers on staff, they still often take advantage of the wide variety of technology partners that integrate with BigCommerce in order to help optimize functionality on their site. 

To optimize checkout, the Just Sunnies team utilizes a plethora of payment methods which includes PayPal as a digital wallet service to keep customer satisfaction at a maximum. “PayPal has been a longtime partner of ours and has contributed to our success,” Hutchesson said. “They remain one of our top payment methods because consumers trust them.” 

Just Sunnies has also been able to use Klaviyo to remain in constant contact with their customer base. “Klaviyo is great for talking directly to our customers and nurturing customer retention. Integrating with BigCommerce, we can use customer and product data to personalize emails and keep customers updated with order details, the latest products they might like to see, and recommendations based on the website and previous purchase activity,” said Brukner. 

“The integration has allowed us to use Klaviyo to assist in making communication between customer service and marketing much easier when dealing with specific customer enquiries,” she continued. 

To optimize the on-site search, merchandising, and product discovery process, Just Sunnies integrated Searchspring into their back-end quickly and easily. 

“We have well over 13,000 products in our catalog,” Hutchesson said with a laugh, “so making it easy for our customers to find exactly what they’re looking for online is really challenging, but also really vital to the purchasing process.” 

“Since partnering with Searchspring, we’ve really been able to elevate the merchandising experience,” Brukner said. “We can customize our search, our merchandising, and even our pagination. Those are all really important features when you’re shopping from a catalog as big as ours. Since then we’ve been able to boost our conversion rate. It’s been such a valuable tool for us.”