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TRACT Optics, a leading brand specializing in high-quality hunting and outdoor optics, offers a range of premium products, including riflescopes, binoculars, and spotting scopes. Founded by optics industry veterans passionate about delivering high-performance gear, TRACT Optics aims to redefine how consumers access top-tier optics by cutting out the middleman. Their direct-to-consumer model eliminates traditional retail markups, allowing them to provide exceptional quality at a more affordable price.
Significant Sales Increase
This reverses a downward sales trend, boosting the bottom line.
10% Better Rankings
More eyes on the website—all the better!
100% Core Web Vitals
The new website passes Google's performance standards.
“The SwiftOtter agency came highly recommended to us from the account executives at BigCommerce and were hired for the task of moving our company from Magento to BigCommerce. Since they were experts with both platforms it made the transition as painless as any major website change could be. We cannot speak highly enough about their communication and follow-up skills and were always willing to help us at any hour of the day or late into the night. They took the necessary time to learn what it's important to us and have not compromised on helping us achieve our goals. The entire SwiftOtter team from top to bottom are wonderful to do business with...You won't be disappointed.”
Jon Allen, TRACT Optics
Before and After
Product page
Category page
Home page
About TRACT Optics
By combining decades of industry expertise with innovative design and technology, TRACT Optics brings a fresh perspective to the market. Their products are meticulously engineered and crafted to meet the demands of hunters, outdoorsmen, and shooting enthusiasts who require precision, reliability, and clarity in every situation.
TRACT Optics is committed to a transparent and customer-first approach, providing customers with the information they need to make informed decisions. This includes detailed product specifications, educational resources, and direct communication channels to ensure buyers have all the necessary tools to get the best out of their gear. Additionally, their website, tractoptics.com, features an array of resources like product tutorials, guides, and comprehensive FAQs, all designed to enhance the overall customer experience and product knowledge.
The company’s mission is to deliver unparalleled service and quality through a model that puts customers directly in touch with the brand. By bypassing traditional retail, TRACT Optics ensures its customers receive superior products and personalized service from a team of passionate optics experts who stand behind every item they sell. Whether you are a seasoned hunter, a wildlife observer, or a shooting enthusiast, TRACT Optics provides the equipment and expertise needed to elevate your outdoor experience.
The Challenge
TRACT Optics, an eCommerce-only business fully dependent on online sales, faced significant challenges with their existing Magento platform. After years of using Magento, the high costs of maintaining the platform—combined with extensive spending on bug fixes, maintenance, security patches, and upgrades—left little room for innovation, making it difficult to introduce new features critical for growth.
Led by two passionate founders, Jon LaCorte and Jon Allen, the company focuses on educating consumers and providing excellent customer service through email, phone, and chat support. However, the technical difficulties of maintaining their platform limited their ability to engage with customers effectively—an essential component of their direct-to-consumer approach.
TRACT Optics also wanted to modernize its ecommerce website to improve the user experience, especially for mobile users. The old site had numerous limitations, such as the absence of an on-site search for mobile, making product discovery cumbersome. The product listing pages (PLPs) required excessive scrolling, further hampering usability, and the checkout process was cumbersome, leading to poor user experience and lower conversion rates.
Additionally, the product detail pages (PDPs) contained extensive specifications and technical details, which were difficult for customers to find. Many users didn’t realize they could scroll down the page for more information, resulting in important details being overlooked. Jon and Jon also had long-term goals to combine similar products into configurable options to enhance the user experience further, but they needed a phased approach that would minimize the impact on SEO during the migration and changes.
The objective was clear: TRACT Optics needed a complete website redesign to deliver a seamless user experience, especially for mobile users, while integrating a streamlined checkout process to boost conversion rates. The new website also needed to maintain TRACT Optics' commitment to quality and align with their direct-to-consumer model, allowing Jon LaCorte and Jon Allen to focus on customer education and support rather than ongoing technical challenges.
The Solution
Jon and Jon reached out to BigCommerce while exploring alternatives to Magento, and BigCommerce quickly connected them with SwiftOtter—the perfect agency for the job. As a BigCommerce Preferred Partner, SwiftOtter has extensive experience with BigCommerce and Magento migrations, making them well-suited to tackle TRACT Optics' needs. They immediately recognized that BigCommerce was the ideal platform for TRACT Optics’ migration, allowing the brand to move beyond the limitations of Magento.
SwiftOtter leveraged its expertise to develop a customized solution tailored to TRACT Optics. This included creating a modern, mobile-friendly ecommerce website that offered a seamless shopping experience across all devices. The design followed mobile-first principles, addressing the usability issues of the old site and ensuring intuitive product discovery for mobile users.
Additionally, BigCommerce's multi-site capabilities met TRACT's requirements for managing warehouses in the US, Canada, and Australia, providing an effective multi-storefront solution that streamlined their operations.
Identified Solutions
Multi-Storefront Setup
SwiftOtter configured multi-storefront capabilities for TRACT Optics to manage stores in the US, Canada, and Australia, with plans to add South Africa in the near future. Leveraging BigCommerce’s settings, this implementation ensured that each store was properly localized to meet the needs of its respective market.
Mobile-Friendly Custom Design Enhancement
Using BigCommerce's sleek and responsive Cornerstone theme as a foundation, SwiftOtter delivered a custom design that resulted in an aesthetically pleasing and high-performing online storefront for TRACT Optics. This provided a consistent and cohesive shopping experience across all devices, which was crucial, given that nearly 75% of TRACT Optics' web traffic originates from mobile users.
Data Migration
SwiftOtter managed the migration of essential data from Magento to BigCommerce, including products, customers, and order history, ensuring a seamless transition to the new platform with no loss of critical information.
Blog Implementation
SwiftOtter set up a WordPress blog with localized versions for all three storefronts (US, Canada, and Australia). The blog was migrated to new hosting with subdomains to retain the flexibility of WordPress, enable localized content, and include redirects to limit any loss of traffic during the transition.
Custom PageBuilder Widgets
SwiftOtter created several custom widgets for the homepage, including a hero banner with autoplay video, a value proposition section, a product features widget, a how to get started section, and a mobile ballistics app widget. These reusable widgets give the client the ability to customize the look, feel, and content across the site, providing flexibility while enhancing overall consistency.
Category Page Implementation
TRACT Optics wanted a more intuitive category page that served as a starting point to help customers choose the right product, rather than overwhelming them with an extensive Product Listing Page (PLP). SwiftOtter implemented a category landing page that guides customers to make informed choices, simplifying navigation and ensuring they aren't buried in a long list of results. This enhanced experience helps users find what they need more efficiently and effectively.
Product Detail Page (PDP)
TRACT's products contain extensive details, including specifications, descriptions, reviews, features, reticle overviews, 360-degree product images and videos. The old PDP required a lot of scrolling, making it cumbersome for users. SwiftOtter redesigned the PDP with a concise, user-friendly layout that works well on mobile, allowing customers to easily find the information they need to make informed purchase decisions.
CMS Pages
SwiftOtter migrated all existing content pages and utilized PageBuilder along with the custom reusable widgets to maintain brand consistency and design throughout the site.
Law Enforcement / Military Group Discounts
TRACT offers discounts to law enforcement, military, and first responders. Previously, they used coupon codes, which were difficult to manage and sometimes misused. SwiftOtter implemented customer groups with group-specific discounts, making the process more secure and easier to manage.
Product Reviews
SwiftOtter integrated Trustpilot for product reviews, including widgets on the homepage and PDP reviews tab, as well as a star rating widget that acts as an anchor link to the reviews section on the PDP. This seamless migration provides a consistent look and enhances user trust.
WordPress Blogs
Previously, TRACT used the Fishpig extension to integrate Magento with WordPress. During the migration, SwiftOtter transitioned the blogs to new subdomains, maintaining them on WordPress and linking to them from the BigCommerce storefront. To ensure continuity, we used Cloudflare workers to implement redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. This approach preserved the original URL structure, retaining SEO value and preventing any loss in search rankings. This setup not only ensures localized content for different storefronts but also avoids broken links, helping maintain a smooth user experience and protecting the site's SEO performance.
Video Library
TRACT has technical products that require detailed videos, both for usage instructions and product information. SwiftOtter migrated these videos as post types within WordPress and ensured the URLs remained unchanged so that any existing content linking to them—whether blogs or emails—was unaffected.
Taxes Setup
SwiftOtter utilized BigCommerce’s basic tax settings to configure taxes for each storefront, including the different tax rates and zones for each location. As TRACT Optics grows, with plans to add a South Africa store soon, they intend to leverage Avalara for streamlined tax calculations and comprehensive tax reporting across all storefronts.
Payments Integration
SwiftOtter set up payment methods for each market: BlueSnap and PayPal for the US, and PayPal for both Canada and Australia, allowing customers to use PayPal without requiring a PayPal account.
Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL)
SwiftOtter integrated PayPal Later to provide Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) options for TRACT Optics customers and they are looking to add Affirm on all 3 storefronts in the near future.
Shipping Rates
SwiftOtter configured table rates for shipping, with different rates for each storefront. Expedited shipping options were also provided for the US store. All configurations utilized BigCommerce's built-in shipping features to meet TRACT's diverse shipping needs.
EasyShip Integration
For fulfillment, TRACT initially used ShipStation. While ShipStation supports multi-storefront functionality with BigCommerce, testing revealed that ShipStation accounts are geo-locked, preventing a single account from shipping to multiple countries. To address this limitation, we pivoted to EasyShip. With EasyShip, we successfully set up all three warehouses under one account and configured various carriers, including UPS, USPS, Canada Post, and Australia Post. New orders from BigCommerce now flow seamlessly into EasyShip, and tracking information is automatically synced back to BigCommerce. This ensures that customers receive timely email updates with their tracking details, improving communication and delivery transparency.
DotDigital Integration
SwiftOtter installed and configured the DotDigital app, ensuring that customers could opt in at checkout, and that the newsletter signup captured signups for both email and SMS.
Multi-Source Inventory App
BigCommerce allows for multiple inventory locations; however, by default, inventory is decremented from the default location. SwiftOtter developed an app hosted on Google Firebase that ensures orders from Australia or Canada adjust the inventory correctly—adding the amount back to the default location and decrementing from the correct warehouse. This solution allows TRACT to maintain accurate inventory levels across multiple locations.
Questions & Answers App
On Magento, TRACT used the Product Questions app by Aheadworks. SwiftOtter developed a custom Questions & Answers app hosted on Google Firebase. Customers can ask questions, and TRACT is automatically notified. TRACT can log in to the app's admin to answer questions, and the answers are automatically posted to the relevant product page, allowing customers to see common questions. The previously existing questions and answers were migrated, and TRACT now has a solution that they can control.
Analytics Setup
TRACT previously faced challenges with Google Analytics before migrating to BigCommerce. SwiftOtter set up Google Analytics 4 with a single account and properties for each storefront, enabling them to access the data they need for insights across different locations.
Technical SEO
A migration of this scale requires more than just moving data; it involves retaining SEO value by implementing proper redirects, maintaining consistent URL structures, optimizing page load speed, and correctly transferring meta tags and schema markup. SwiftOtter handled these critical aspects to ensure TRACT Optics retained its search engine rankings and organic traffic throughout the transition.
The Road Ahead
TRACT Optics is focused on accelerating growth by expanding into new markets with additional localized storefronts, including the upcoming South Africa store. Thanks to BigCommerce's scalability, this expansion can be managed effortlessly, allowing TRACT to reach a broader audience without operational challenges. They plan to combine similar products into configurable options, simplifying the buying process even further. They aim to wait until the SEO from the migration stabilizes to avoid making too many changes at once.
With the high platform maintenance costs now behind them, TRACT can reinvest its resources into initiatives that enhance customer engagement and improve the shopping experience. They are eager to implement new features based on customer feedback, further increasing conversion rates and delivering greater value to their expanding customer base.
The Outcome
Migrating to BigCommerce has equipped TRACT Optics with a modern, scalable ecommerce platform that significantly elevates the customer experience. The new website is intuitive, mobile-friendly, and features a streamlined checkout process, offering a seamless and engaging shopping journey. As of this case study, year-over-year (YoY) sales have increased by 5-6% in recent weeks. By comparison, before the site launch in September, YoY had dropped.
This transition has allowed Jon LaCorte and Jon Allen to focus more on customer education and relationship building, free from the technical difficulties that previously consumed their time. With better data insights and an adaptable eCommerce solution, TRACT can make strategic, growth-focused decisions.
Thanks to a reliable, scalable platform and a strong partnership with SwiftOtter, TRACT is set for continuous innovation, steady growth, and long-term success.
