AFTCO Headless Shopify + Next.js + Contentful
American Fishing & Tackle Company
The American Fishing & Tackle Company (AFTCO) exemplifies a business that recognizes the importance of composable commerce, quickly developing prototypes and adapting to their customers' evolving demands. Recently, we collaborated with AFTCO to launch their new headless store, and with their approval, we are sharing a case study to offer insights for other companies aiming for similar growth. For many years, AFTCO successfully operated a traditional monolithic Shopify store that featured the excellent products available in their retail locations throughout the Western U.S. What distinguishes them from their competitors (in addition to their exceptional equipment) is their readiness to take bold measures to enhance their digital operations and customer experience. While the legacy Shopify store performed adequately, it had plateaued. AFTCO aimed to continuously evolve the site through A/B testing, optimizations, modern user interface, and product personalization. However, adding plugins or extensions to achieve these objectives negatively impacted their core web vitals and page loading times, hindering their progress. We assisted their team in several ways:
- Achieved a performance score of 99/100 on Google's PageSpeed Insights
- Resolved their failing Core Web Vitals assessments
- Established a CI/CD pipeline for automatic publishing of content changes in Contentful
- Integrated Klevu, an AI-driven product recommendation service
- Identified a more budget-friendly hosting solution
- Saved over a terabyte of monthly data transfer through site performance optimization
- Implemented custom content writing tools to enhance the marketing team's productivity
- Developed a future-proof architecture, allowing for the replacement of any service without needing a complete platform overhaul.