Mountain Crest Gardens orders bloom 400% after migration to BigCommerce

The Mountain Crest Gardens success story

Mountain Crest Gardens attributes its success to its niche market.

The family-owned and operated company, located in northern California, began growing and selling succulent plants in the mid-1990s.

Matts Jopson joined his father in the company’s retail arm after graduating college with a degree in computer science, a minor in business management and digital arts. At the time, Mountain Crest Gardens was a three-person operation that barely broke even most years.

However, five years ago, business started to take off, and the company realized it needed an ecommerce platform that would offer a positive customer experience and facilitate continued growth.

BigCommerce migration from Magento Go takes company growth to new levels

As told to BigCommerce by Matts Jopson, VP, mountaincrestgardens.com

For years, Mountain Crest Gardens operated on a clunky, open-source interface called OS Commerce. In 2012, we decided to relaunch the whole website from scratch.

At the time, I researched different ecommerce platforms, and I decided to move to Magento Go. It was fine for the first year, and sales increased slightly. By the next year, I began to see the potential growth for Mountain Crest Gardens.

In 2014, Magento Go was discontinued, and we ended up transitioning onto BigCommerce.

With BigCommerce, we soon realized it was very easy to experiment with third-party enhancements. All of the sudden we had access to product option features that were unavailable, or incomplete, in Magento Go. BigCommerce’s templates were also modern, making it easy for us to launch with a fully-responsive mobile-ready site from day one.

It was also refreshing to work with the customer support team at BigCommerce, who we’ve found to be vastly superior to the technical resources we had access to on our prior platform.

400% increase in orders while reducing advertising spend 50%

As told to BigCommerce by Matts Jopson, VP, mountaincrestgardens.com

Our performance on the BigCommerce platform has been stellar. Since migrating to BigCommerce in mid-2014, orders on Mountain Crest Gardens have increased more than 400%.

Our organic search results have also improved, and we’ve been able to drastically reduce our advertising costs by 50% as compared to our previous run rate before migrating to BigCommerce.

As a result, Mountain Crest Gardens’ business has greatly expanded. Today, I still run all aspects of operations, but our staff has grown to more than 20 employees.

Ecommerce experts Arctic Leaf deliver modern, flexible design

As told to BigCommerce by Matts Jopson, VP, mountaincrestgardens.com

In 2017, I decided it was time to create our first fully custom BigCommerce website using its Stencil framework. We outsourced the design and development of the new site to a BigCommerce design and development partner, Arctic Leaf, and in October 2017 launched our new website.

Since launch, our site has exceeded our expectations in every way. The team at Arctic Leaf really has their act together, and we’re constantly making enhancements. They’ve helped us solve many of the problems we had with our previous site design and developer.

Leveraging user-generated content through Rivet Works

As told to BigCommerce by Matts Jopson, VP, mountaincrestgardens.com

I was contacted by a content marketing tool called Rivet Works that automates the collection of high-quality consumer photos, videos, and reviews to be used on our BigCommerce site and across social media channels. After learning more about its tool, I felt it would benefit our company because our product is aesthetically beautiful and the use cases for our products are widely varied and visually interesting.

Having this type of content that showcases the ways our customers are using and displaying our products is ideal for our business. Not only can we utilize it within our marketing strategy, but it also increases our employees’ job satisfaction to see the direct result of their efforts.

Integrating Rivet Works has produced 2,000 submissions in the last year on the reviews page of our website. We tag these photos and display them on relevant product and category pages. We also convert these submissions to social media posts, use in advertising, newsletters, and original blog content.

Increasing email sign-ups with Privy

As told to BigCommerce by Matts Jopson, VP, mountaincrestgardens.com

We decided to test out a new approach to getting email sign-ups on our website through an app called Privy.

People like to participate in contests or take a chance at winning something, so we integrated a spinner on our home page through Privy.

Once they submit their name and email, each website visitor can spin to win. It’s fun for the customer to try to win a discount to our BigCommerce shop, and Privy’s statistics show this prompt gets a much higher response rate than with a traditional pop-up screen. Our response rate using Privy to encourage visitors to sign up for our e-newsletter has been really great so far.

Constant platform improvements and customer feedback always welcomed by BigCommerce

As told to BigCommerce by Matts Jopson, VP, mountaincrestgardens.com

BigCommerce has continually improved the platform since 2014, with numerous enhancements that have been relevant to our business. BigCommerce listens to its customers and evolves the platform accordingly.

We have had a great experience with BigCommerce, and I look forward to our continued success.