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Trade Coffee’s Complex Digital Infrastructure Impedes Scale

Trade Coffee offers a unique subscription experience that pairs customers with coffee from roasteries around the United States based on their taste preferences.  

As Trade entered 2023, the business realized it needed to confront a harsh reality: its once cutting-edge digital infrastructure had become a liability. The customizations that had once propelled growth were now impeding the brand’s agility.

Saddled with a monolithic, tightly-coupled architecture, Trade found itself mired in a technological quagmire. Despite a growing subscriber base, the costs—both financial and operational—of maintaining their bespoke systems were spiraling out of control.

Trade Coffee needed a bold pivot. And fast.

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The Bitter Reality Slowing Down Trade Coffee

Anatta’s Innovative Ordergroove Implementation

While Trade Coffee’s DTC business continued to grow, its technology foundation became progressively problematic in parallel. The complexities of maintaining its highly customized, monolithic architecture were starting to take a toll.

Trade faced:

The Solution: Anatta Untangles Technical Complexity & Unlocks Growth  

Anatta approached the challenge of migrating Trade Coffee's complex ecosystem to Shopify Plus with a strategic blend of technical expertise and innovative problem-solving.

Anatta’s leading goal was maintaining the unique functionality that set Trade Coffee apart while drastically improving Trade’s technical scalability and efficiency. This delicate balance required a nuanced understanding of both Trade Coffee's business model and the capabilities of the Shopify Plus ecosystem.

Kicking off the migration sprint, Anatta launched a comprehensive assessment of Trade's existing infrastructure. Anatta then meticulously mapped out the intricate web of custom features, data structures, and integrations that powered Trade's personalized subscription model. Anatta hand-picked solutions and apps that played well with Shopify’s ecosystem—and piece-by-piece, built out a new, streamlined, and agile foundation for Trade.

A key challenge of simplifying Trade’s technology was transitioning the brand’s unique "taste profile" subscription system. When customers create a subscription with Trade, they’re given a personalized taste profile following the completion of a quiz.

Then, using an AI-driven recommendation engine, Trade sources coffee from roasteries around the United States that fit the customer’s taste profile and delivers their order. A customer’s taste profile is entirely unique to each user; and both a customer’s taste profile and subscription experience can be further personalized and changed based on feedback and input within their account portal.

On the back-end, Trade’s subscription solution was entirely custom, having been developed from scratch, iterated on, and maintained with the help of internal engineering resources.

In order to streamline Trade’s sophisticated solution, Anatta partnered with Ordergroove to recreate complex functionality within a more standardized framework. But migrating Trade to Ordergroove was no simple process.
Anatta took on both intricate data mapping and the development of custom APIs within the Ordergroove platform to ensure that Trade’s recommendation engine could seamlessly interface with Trade’s new Shopify store.

More Success Stories with Anatta

• Skyrocketing technical debt and maintenance costs
• Sluggish time-to-market for new features and optimizations
• Inability to rapidly iterate and optimize marketing initiatives

The goal was clear: maintain the unique functionality that set the brand experience apart while dramatically improving scalability, efficiency, and the ability to innovate rapidly.

For its new foundation, Trade considered Shopify Plus. However, the team wasn’t convinced the platform would allow Trade to recreate its innovative subscription experience.

Trade needed a partner capable of navigating the complexities of their custom system and guiding them through a transformative migration to a centralized, agile, and scalable technology framework. It was in this context that Trade Coffee turned to Anatta.

Addressing the marketing team's need for greater autonomy and faster iteration, Anatta leveraged Shopify's native capabilities and carefully selected third-party applications. This new setup empowered the marketing team to create and modify landing pages, run A/B tests, and launch new campaigns without heavy reliance on the development team.

The data migration from Solidus to Shopify Plus was a monumental task itself, involving the transfer of over 5,000 products and more than a million customer records. To maintain strong data integrity throughout migration, Anatta developed specialized scripts and employed iterative testing processes.

One significant hurdle during the migration process was working within Shopify's API limitations. Anatta innovatively restructured its API calls, transitioning from admin APIs to storefront APIs where possible, to optimize website performance and ensure smooth internal operation.

For even further reduced cost and back-end complexity, Anatta migrated Trade Coffee from Heroku to AWS.

Alongside Trade’s solution migrations, Anatta launched a transformational redesign of Trade’s user experience. The redesign included creating a new account dashboard that simplified subscription management for customers while also maintaining the rich functionality of the previous system. After extensive usability testing, Trade achieved a 32% increase in system usability score for its account dashboard.

Leaning on Anatta’s conversion optimization experts, Trade was also able to accomplish:

Crafting a Conversion-Driving Customer Experience

• Dynamic, personalized homepages for logged-in subscribers
• High-converting product detail pages optimized for engagement
• Revamped navigation and taxonomies to accelerate product discovery
  

Deviating from industry norms, Trade’s conversion rates did not initially decrease following Anatta’s redesign work, but instead, achieved an even higher benchmark. 

Trade’s entire migration from Solidus to Shopify Plus was completed in 120 days. This was no mere "lift-and-shift” either.

Anatta helped Trade: 

Results: Trade Coffee Scales for A New Era of Growth

• Transfer 5,000+ products and millions of customer records 
• Slash reliance on custom code from 80% to a lean 20%
• Integrate best-in-class apps to streamline Trade Coffee's Martech stack
• Redesign Trade’s website UX to drive meaningful improvements in engagement and usability
  

The defining result? Trade Coffee now has a digital ecosystem primed for speed, scale, and powerful personalization.

The Future is Bright – and AI-Powered

As Trade Coffee looks to the future, the brand is equipped with a digital infrastructure that can support its ambitious plans. With Anatta’s support, the company is actively exploring cutting-edge technologies, including advanced AI applications, for even more personalized customer experiences.

Anatta’s Innovative Ordergroove Implementation

A key challenge of simplifying Trade’s technology was transitioning the brand’s unique "taste profile" subscription system. When customers create a subscription with Trade, they’re given a personalized taste profile following the completion of a quiz.

Then, using an AI-driven recommendation engine, Trade sources coffee from roasteries around the United States that fit the customer’s taste profile and delivers their order. A customer’s taste profile is entirely unique to each user; and both a customer’s taste profile and subscription experience can be further personalized and changed based on feedback and input within their account portal.

On the back-end, Trade’s subscription solution was entirely custom, having been developed from scratch, iterated on, and maintained with the help of internal engineering resources.

In order to streamline Trade’s sophisticated solution, Anatta partnered with Ordergroove to recreate complex functionality within a more standardized framework. But migrating Trade to Ordergroove was no simple process.
Anatta took on both intricate data mapping and the development of custom APIs within the Ordergroove platform to ensure that Trade’s recommendation engine could seamlessly interface with Trade’s new Shopify store.