Case study · West Desert Wheeler · E-commerce
of revenue was going to shipping labels the store paid for.
a year absorbed, from 90 days of real label data.
after the switch, a real customer order went through on the new server.
orders from 26.82k visitors during the next product launch.
01 · The situation
West Desert Wheeler sells RC crawler tires and parts online. The store ran on shared hosting from a big provider, and every technical issue meant waiting on their support. Logan had no one in his corner.
The brief was simple: move it to a server I manage, without losing a single order.
02 · The move
I moved the store to a server I manage, with a page cache that understands carts, nightly off-site backups and uptime monitoring. Then I tested a full restore, because a backup you haven't restored is a guess.
I wrote the cutover order so the riskiest step went last. The site went live on 9 September. A real customer order completed 12 minutes after the switch.
03 · What I found
Email had been silently failing for six days. The store reported every message as sent. Customers weren't getting them. I found the cause, resent every missed order confirmation, and added a daily check so it can't go quiet again.
Free shipping was costing more than anyone thought. I pulled 90 days of real label data. The store had spent $2,656 on labels – 9.1% of revenue, or about $10.8k a year it was absorbing.
04 · The fix
Live carrier rates were the obvious answer, but over half the catalogue had no weight on file. So I recommended a flat $7.95 per order instead, and no price cuts to offset it. An $8 cut would have cancelled the whole recovery.
Logan made the call. Flat-rate shipping went live on 5 October, with sticker-only orders kept free.
05 · Then the launch
A week later West Desert Wheeler launched the Mesa 1.9" tire. I built the launch email, checked it against the full list of 2,135 recipients before it went out, and added a sitewide banner to the product.
The new server handled 361.32k requests from 26.82k visitors during the launch. They turned into 431 orders.
“Everything is smooth sailing because he set it up right the first time. I have recommended many friends to NUUN and will continue to support them.”
Why it matters
Most of the value wasn't in the job I was hired for. It was in what I noticed while doing it. That's what the roadmap is for – finding it before you pay for the build.
See how the roadmap works →Thirty minutes. Same-day reply. If I'm not the right fit, I'll say so.
