Carewell Up Levels Customer Care After Switching to BigCommerce

Service-Centric Family Business Meets Ecommerce

Carewell started as an idea that hit close to home for Bianca Padilla. The Co-Founder and CEO grew up in a three-generation household and spent years watching her mother scramble to find caregiving supplies for her grandmother, who began struggling with incontinence in her late 80s/early 90s. Bianca noticed that most marketplaces didn’t provide the kind of support her family needed to choose the right products for them. Moreover, many of these products were difficult to find and confusing to shop for; neither Bianca nor her mother felt confident making the purchase, and often felt as if they were taking a gamble on whether the product would work.

Occasionally, Bianca’s family found quality home health products — those were good days. Even so, Bianca realized that while there were good products on the market, many consumers didn’t have access to them or lacked guidance on purchasing the right products for their needs. That’s when Bianca and her husband Jonathan got the idea for Carewell, as a way to support other families dealing with similar issues and give them peace of mind when buying medical supplies for loved ones. Based on their own experience, the couple knew that people not only needed quality products but somebody they could rely on to answer their questions.

With that, what started as an adult diaper subscription service pivoted into a high-touch customer service model. Carewell’s service-centric philosophy extended into the customer experience and onsite experience that was powered by Shopify at the time. Bianca had a great feeling about using ecommerce to bolster Carewell’s mission. What she didn’t foresee were the many complications that came with running her online store on Shopify.

Challenging Limitations and Pain Points on Shopify

As told to BigCommerce by Bianca Padilla, Co-Founder & CEO, Carewell.

Shopify was very limiting. We had to be on its enterprise platform to have any control over the checkout. As for its front-end templating language, it was very hard for us to develop locally and push changes up from GitHub, or test things locally — this was a huge pain point for us. We also wanted to customize the experience more, and trying to do that on Shopify was difficult. Shopify is a great system because it's very simple, but when you have a more complex product catalog, you need greater ability to manage your store your own way.

Another challenge we faced on Shopify was with customers being unable to save their credit card payments. I know that Shopify has developed a feature on Shopify Pay where customers get a code messaged to their phone in order to check out. But because our demographic tends to skew older, it doesn't make a lot of sense for us because our customers wouldn't be familiar with it. They already lack trust on the internet, so it’s really important for us to provide an experience that is as simple and seamless as possible. Storing credit card information was one of the major reasons why we moved to BigCommerce. Customers transacting on our Shopify site led to a lot of friction in the purchasing journey, while on BigCommerce, the ability to check out quickly using a stored payment is incredibly important for our business and has directly increased our conversion rate by 200%.

We first found BigCommerce by doing our own internet research. We took advantage of the 14-day free trial, testing and playing around with the system. We realized BigCommerce was basically the Android to Shopify’s Apple — it had significantly more features and a better checkout setup experience, so we ended up choosing BigCommerce. It’s a perfect balance of being as simple to set up as Shopify but not as overwhelming as Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Powerful Apps Integrate With Carewell’s BigCommerce Store

As told to BigCommerce by Bianca Padilla, Co-Founder & CEO, Carewell.

BigCommerce’s integration with Yotpo is a great tool to collect reviews back from customers. One great feature is that it allows us to respond back to customers and create a dialog. For example, if a customer is unhappy with the product, we always proactively reach out and offer them a free sample of something that may work for them. It’s done wonders helping us foster better relationships with our customers.

Subuno has been extremely helpful in detecting fraud, and has saved us thousands of dollars. I think everybody needs a good fraud tool, and Subuno is the cheapest and probably most customizable one that I've worked with — and it really works. Once placed orders are in Subuno, they’re checked against risk factors such as fraud score, block/white lists, and more. It’s super simple because we can customize our rules and tell the system what to look for. Subuno has helped us catch some fraudulent activity, and has brought incidents of fraud down to nothing. 

As for our marketing channels, email is the most profitable, followed by Google Ads. We started using Klaviyo at the end of 2019, and saw really great results — our email went from 9% to 30% of total revenue. Out of all the other email providers we’ve tried in the past, Klaviyo hands down is the winner. We love that it gives us the ability to do segmentation, A/B testing, and many more great things. It's truly the most powerful email platform, and it has largely amplified the success of our BigCommerce store.

BigCommerce Support Is Just a Phone Call or Email Away

As told to BigCommerce by Bianca Padilla, Co-Founder & CEO, Carewell.

The ongoing support we’ve received from the BigCommerce team has been an absolute asset to the success of our business. Our BigCommerce Customer Success Manager, Ethan has been incredibly helpful in relaying new BigCommerce features and updates as well as getting us into beta programs. This has empowered us to plan more efficiently, make better decisions and develop a strategy around what new things we’ll want to build into our store.

Ethan has also been quick to respond to any of our concerns or things we’ve had trouble with. Whenever I’ve caught a bug here and there, I've been able to simply report them to Ethan, and he always stays on top of it to make sure it gets fixed. Having somebody who consistently advocates for you in a big company like BigCommerce is an invaluable thing to have.

A Labor of Love

As told to BigCommerce by Bianca Padilla, Co-Founder & CEO, Carewell.

There are some really exciting developments for Carewell on the horizon. We were just accepted into SheScales, a first-of-its-kind, women-led performance marketing accelerator for female-founded brands. SheScales was created by the women at the helm of Rain the Growth Agency. They empower female-founders with expertise in advertising, business, and creative strategy, helping their businesses scale while building a brand that customers love. Some of their past clients include Chewy, 23andMe, and Peloton, so we’re looking forward to joining the ranks. They also have very deep knowledge in the senior care space, having worked with Humana and A Place for Mom, which is obviously promising for our company.

We are a family-run business, and caregiving is a labor of love. We treat customers as an extension of our own family, and we act as a support system for them as well as providing the products that they need. When we made the switch from Shopify to BigCommerce about two years ago, we’ve seen incredible success in conversion rates, sales, and more than we thought possible. Many of the Carewell reviews we receive are titled, “Thankful for a company that cares.” We truly pride ourselves on that, and we feel the exact same way about BigCommerce.