BRILLIANT.TECH

CUSTOM SHOPIFY THEME DEVELOPMENT FOR SMART HOME SYSTEMS

Client

Founded in 2016, Brilliant Technologies is an award-winning smart home company that manufactures and sells smart home systems. Their tech helps residents and property managers easily control their lighting, music, cameras, locks, climate, scenes, and more, and is one of the world’s leading smart home brands - accelerating the mainstream adoption of smart home living with affordable and user-friendly products.

Challenge

Shopify Plus sits at the center of Brilliant’s eCommerce experience. So, when their lead Frontend Shopify developer announced their departure from Brilliant, the company very quickly needed to find a reliable and experienced replacement who could take over legacy code and continue building the features they needed. Brilliant approached Spiral Scout with the need for an expert Shopify developer that could not only support the existing site but also help them add new features and build out additional pages, implement 3rd plugins, and build customized e-commerce analytics tracking.

Strategy

As usual, we started with an audit of the site during onboarding to identify underperforming areas, create an event structure and logic for an effective workflow, and establish some quick wins for Brilliant. During this audit, we uncovered a number of areas that needed improvement to help Brilliant's store function at an optimum level. Holding them back was:

Poor infrastructure settings and configurations
Complicated code logic
Multiple UI/UX issues
Irrelevant libraries and plugins
Large and bloated codebase size

This gave us a large number of optimizations to fulfill from the first week, and we established a plan with Brilliant to solve them over a number of weeks. During these weeks, we completed a number of tasks:

Creation of ten new web pages, PRO portals, quizzes, new products, and bundles
Improvement of page designs, analytics, and the Zendesk help center
Implementation of A/B testing, multiple Zapier integrations, Klaviyo forms, and third-party subscriptions

/ Brilliant.tech

Solutions

Having inherited the tech stack from the previous developers and identifying a number of unnecessary elements, we made the choice to execute a number of stack migrations, including:

Slate → Shopify-starter-kit (Slate had a number of platform limitations that couldn’t accommodate custom features)

Wufoo Forms → Custom forms, Google Sheets, and Zapier (Wufoo forms had many customization and analytics limitations)

Jquery Slider → Splide (Splide was significantly more convenient to work with)

Old project structure → New project structure (Site speed improved with a new structure)

Results

Our work with Brilliant took us through more than 1500 tasks in total, all of which were successfully completed and closed within the agreed timelines. Our software development company continues to work with them to this day. Over the course of the last few years, we helped them to optimize and redesign their site, as well as their help center. When reviewing the A/B tests, we were pleased to see that the redesigned site noticeably lifted the store’s conversion rate when compared to the previous design. A speedier and more modern store gave the Brilliant team a stronger platform which allowed them to launch three new products and continue collaborating with us on additional features.

Review

“Brilliant wanted to create a number of custom rules and features that simply weren’t possible out-of-the-box with third-party services or Shopify platform itself. To solve this, we found a number of workarounds, like using Zapier webhooks instead of Wufoo forms or creating our own custom tool to go beyond the limitations of Slate.“