A DIY store rebuilt into R482K in sales.
Boba Licious was growing fast and held back by a self-built website. Three weeks later it was a proper WooCommerce business with a wholesale route, and the analytics did something unusual.
Who is Boba Licious?
A specialist supplier of premium bubble tea ingredients in Vanderbijlpark, founded by Claudia Bronwyn Strydom and sourcing directly from Taiwan: tapioca pearls, popping boba, fruit purees, syrups, tea leaves and accessories.
What was holding it back?
A self-built website, in a market that is unusually driven by how things look. Bubble tea is a visual product sold to a visual audience, and the store had to carry both retail and wholesale customers without confusing either.
The story, in plain words.
Claudia Strydom built Boba Licious the way many good small businesses begin: close to the product. She brings in tapioca pearls, popping boba, fruit purees and syrups straight from Taiwan, and sells them from Vanderbijlpark to people who want to make a proper bubble tea at home, and to businesses that buy in bulk to sell it on.
The shop’s website had been put together by hand, and for a while it did its job. But the business grew faster than the site did. A long catalogue with no real structure is hard to shop, a home buyer and a business buyer want different things from the same page, and a store that people cannot find in search is a catalogue nobody opens. In a market that is sold on how it looks, that mattered.
So we rebuilt it as a proper WooCommerce store. The range is sorted into clear categories, there is a separate route for wholesale customers with their own pricing, and the SEO and hosting sit behind it to keep the traffic coming after launch day. Three weeks from start to finish.
The year before the rebuild, the shop took R116 553 in sales across 138 orders. Over the period after launch, measured against the same stretch of the year before, that became R482 934 across 399 orders, with 3 248 products sold. The retail side grew, and the wholesale route brought in a kind of customer the old site could not really serve.
What did we build?
A clean WooCommerce store with the wholesale route built in rather than bolted on, plus the SEO and hosting to keep it working after launch.
The store as it runs today: the full range presented by category, with wholesale registration built into the path.
What did it produce?
R482 934 in net sales against R116 553 the year before, a 314% increase, with orders up 187% and 3 248 products sold across nine categories. The redesign did the converting, and the wholesale route opened a second kind of customer.