You Don’t Need A Gut Renovation to Improve Conversion

Ask any homeowner, and they’ll tell you there’s a world of difference between adding a coat of fresh paint to a wall and tearing the wall down to the studs. Both efforts can yield a spruced-up home, but if you decide to gut renovate, you’re in for more time and expenses than you think—no matter how much planning you do.That’s a useful way to think about improving your commerce presence, too. Traditionally, there’s been no option for sites other than to renovate entirely. To upgrade a website was a multi-month, multi-stage process. You’d rip out the entire tech stack and rebuild from scratch—because that was the only way to make certain improvements.Not anymore.&nbsp;The old monolithic tech stack is gone. At Bolt, one of the things we prioritized from the start was building adaptable, flexible tools for our merchant customers. We didn’t want our customers to have to wait or agonize before making changes. We also didn’t want them to sacrifice scale, security, or custom integrations. And we knew that today’s headless and decentralized technologies allow you to do both: You can run a big operation and change it on a dime if you need.Consider a simple tweak, like the introduction of a new payment provider. At Bolt, we are payment provider agnostic—if you have a payment provider you like, odds are you can use it with <a href="https://www.bolt.com/checkoutos">Bolt</a>. Why did we do that? Because we know that there’s an ebb and flow in the payments business, and that network effects can take time. If a new payment provider offers better and faster service, our merchant partners should be able to switch things around quickly.Just a few years ago, adding a new payment provider or making changes to checkout was a huge endeavor. That’s not the case today. The big technical tradeoffs and site redesigns have been replaced with menus of options and quick code pushes.&nbsp;Or at least they should be. Not all checkout technologies are the same, and while we’ve made flexibility a priority, we know that too many systems are still rigid and inflexible. Beware of anyone who tells you that your checkout system only changes if you measure twice, and cut once. In today’s environment, you need to be able to cut, then cut again, and cut a final time.&nbsp;If a new digital currency ecosystem takes off and it fits with your brand identity, you should be able to integrate it. If an order fulfillment mechanism better suits your needs, you should be able to use it without having to wait weeks. That’s how you’ll improve conversion in the moment: By making sure you can upgrade as technology changes—today, that happens around-the-clock.Flexibility didn’t used to be table stakes, but it is today. With the right partners, you can be nimble and flexible, without impacting your entire store ecosystem because of a modest change. That’s important, too: Shoppers are expecting reliability and constant up-time. This isn’t the internet shopping experience of the 90s—you won’t be easily forgiven if your site goes down or if your mobile experience is a mess.&nbsp;But today, unlike the 90s, you don’t have to choose between reliability and flexibility. You can get both. You can get all the benefits of a renovation—but without having to tear down walls, or tear your hair out. That’s how we’ve built Bolt from the start, and it’s what our merchants—and their customers—have come to expect. Merchants are seeing how they can use Bolt to quickly make major changes that positively impact their business. For example, <a href="https://www.bolt.com/blog/benefit-cosmetics-higher-checkout-rates-bolt">Benefit Cosmetics recently implemented Bolt</a> to improve their checkout in less than three months—a process that would have taken multiple quarters, if not years, without a solution designed for flexibility. That flexibility and speed impacts the bottom line: With Bolt, Benefit saw its checkout rates on its UK site rise by 82% this year, along with a 24.2% increase in checkout conversion rates.&nbsp;