Apium Original Store — e-commerce build — Marketing MIX case

The brief

Apium Original Store is a specialty retailer of audio equipment and accessories, with a niche but loyal customer base across the EU and the Russian-speaking diaspora. The pre-existing store ran on an aging WooCommerce installation that loaded slowly, struggled with peak traffic during product launches, and couldn't handle the firm's pricing complexity (tiered pricing for trade customers, different VAT handling per EU member state).

The goal: migrate to a platform that could scale, redesign around conversion, and add a second and third language without breaking SEO.

What we did

Migration to Shopify Plus

Full SKU migration (980 products), URL preservation with 301 redirects, image optimization through Cloudflare, and a trade-customer pricing tier built on Shopify's B2B functionality. Two weeks of parallel running to validate order integrity before the cutover.

Multi-language store

EN as the canonical, with RU and DE locales — proper hreflang, localized product descriptions written by native speakers (not auto-translated), region-aware shipping calculation and VAT handling.

Conversion-focused redesign

Product pages restructured around the three questions every audio buyer asks: what does it sound like, will it work with my existing gear, what's the return process. Audio samples embedded where possible. Real reviews from real customers (the WooCommerce review database migrated intact). Schema markup for AggregateRating, Product, Offer.

Bundle and accessory cross-sell

Smart product-page recommendations for compatible accessories (cables, stands, cases). Cart-level upsell for warranty and protection. Powered by a custom Shopify app we built — Shopify's built-in recommendations weren't smart enough for the niche.

Paid search optimization

Google Shopping feed cleaned up — incorrect product types, missing GTINs, and brand-attribute issues fixed. Brand-defense campaign launched for product names. Audience layering on Meta to retarget cart abandoners with the specific products viewed.

What we learned

Product-page conversion in niche e-commerce is bottlenecked by trust signals, not by funnel optimization. The single highest-ROI change wasn't the cart-flow redesign or the cross-sell module — it was adding real audio samples to product pages. Customers who could hear the product before buying converted at 5.3% versus 2.8% for product pages without samples.

For other e-commerce builds: /online-store-development. For the paid-search work alongside organic: /targeting-ads and /seo-promotion.

Project lead: Marketing MIX. Client: Apium Original Store. Year: 2023–2024.