How we built a custom e-shop that lets the business grow

Balistas is an e-shop selling freely-available weapons like air rifles, bows, and crossbows. It's the first Czech e-shop with a comprehensive range of gear for shooting, hunting, and the outdoors, and it's also the exclusive importer of top brands into Czechia and Europe. Balistas came to us in 2021 — at the time, they had two e-shops that didn't talk to each other at all, and one of them was significantly outdated. They urgently needed to merge the two e-shops, unify their database and run everything from a single admin. Uploading every product twice, once for each e-shop, had become unsustainable for them.

Migrating customer accounts is a nightmare for anyone migrating an e-shop. A customer database is one of the most valuable assets a business has, and nobody wants to lose it. For Balistas, we managed to migrate customer accounts to the new e-shop with all their data except passwords. Customers just had to generate a new password for their account, and they had access to their entire purchase history again.

I was dreading the migration — my previous work experience with moving an e-shop was genuinely awful. So it was a huge relief that Superkoders managed to prepare the migration based on data from the old e-shop, which was definitely not in good shape.

Balistas didn't just have two customer databases — they had several. Each one had a different structure from the others, and even within a single database the data was often inconsistent, since it had been handled differently over the years. So we had to deal with not just the migration itself, but also an automated data cleanup.

The actual “switchover” to the new e-shop was split into two phases. In the first phase, we imported the bulk of the data into the new e-shop — everything collected over more than 10 years of the e-shop's existence. Data from the final month before launch was then imported right before going live, synced overnight during the migration itself. We managed to finish the migration within a few hours, overnight, so Balistas never had to explain to customers why the e-shop wasn't working.

As part of the migration, we of course also set up redirects for individual pages. That's an SEO must-have, so the new e-shop wouldn't drop in search rankings. This was extremely important for Balistas, because both Facebook and Google have very strict advertising policies that ban promoting any weapons, even non-offensive ones. That means Balistas can't rely on the paid ads most e-shops build their online marketing on.

At Superkoders, we always expect to discuss the brief with the client and find the best price-to-performance approach for them. It's important to us that we understand our client's business — that's the only way we can come up with the optimal solution.

In Balistas's case, we worked on the e-shop for about a year — but that shouldn't be taken as a rule of thumb. The development itself can easily take just a few months. For Balistas, we spent 2 months fine-tuning the brief, which we worked through in real detail.

There are plenty of ready-made e-shops on the market, off-the-shelf solutions, which are relatively cheap and simple to implement. But if you want to give your e-shop's customers an above-standard customer experience and an e-shop that works exactly the way you imagine it should, a custom-built e-shop is the optimal solution. The same goes if you have your own warehouse or accounting system — connecting an off-the-shelf solution to those would be fairly difficult.

We don't build e-shops completely from scratch — we build on what we already have ready, so the development cost isn't as staggering as some potential clients often assume. The basic functionality of an e-shop is essentially the same everywhere, and we already have that in place. We only adjust or newly develop the things a client needs or wants custom-tailored.

For Balistas, we implemented a range of features into the e-shop that improve the shopping experience for customers while also making life easier for the e-shop's administrators. For the latter, the new e-shop was a huge step forward, since they now work from a single admin for every language and business variant. In total there are 9 of them — each of the four language versions has a section for both retail and wholesale customers, which means there are 8 e-shops on the balistas domain alone. On top of that, Balistas has a dedicated e-shop for part of their range — zbrane-vzduchovky.cz. Administrators manage this e-shop from the same admin as the main Balistas e-shop.

Every language version of the site (see the example from balistas.com below) automatically detects where the visitor is browsing from and offers them the language version in their own language, if one exists.

The e-shop's admin is what's called multi-site, so if Balistas ever decides to launch another language or product variant, it'll be very easy to do. That lets the business grow and expand into foreign markets with ease.

Working with language versions is made easier for administrators by an integration with the automatic DeepL translator, which translates pages reasonably well — Balistas then only needs to lightly touch up the translations.

We localized the e-shop's language versions — it's not just translation. The e-shops differ slightly beyond currency, mainly in shipping (both the shipping methods and prices differ from the Czech e-shop, and so do the shipping limits). As part of the localization, we also factor in each country's public holidays when calculating delivery dates.

Balistas has an elaborate loyalty program: customers earn loyalty pellets not just for purchases, but also, for example, for leaving a review on the site or for creating a customer account. Customers stockpile pellets in their account and can eventually redeem them for the product they've had their eye on.

A large share of customers make their decisions based on reviews and recommendations — and by the way, that holds true well beyond just weapons. That's why, with Balistas, we decided to make the most of customer reviews. That applies both to reviews customers leave through Heureka (these get imported into the e-shop automatically and must be approved by the e-shop's administrator before they're published) and to reviews customers post directly on the Balistas e-shop.

We built the loyalty program so that customers get rewarded for posting a review on the site with loyalty pellets. If a customer doesn't leave a review for a product they bought, the e-shop automatically reminds them a few weeks after the purchase.

One of our pillars is quality content — descriptions, photos, parameters, categorization. We also count customer questions on the product detail page, or reviews themselves, as content — I'd say no e-shop in our industry has as many reviews as we do. With reviews, we're also able to accept user photos, and we carry those over into every language version.

Reviews also help strengthen the e-shop's position in search results. For hobby weapons, it's common for customers to browse product reviews first, typing the product name plus “review” into a search engine. The Balistas e-shop is built to take advantage of this and show that visitor a customized product page, where reviews are given more prominence and the product copy itself is kept very brief.

This way, Balistas manages to earn what's known as featured snippets in Google's organic search results (featured snippets), which appear right at the very top, even above the regular search results. That's the best news you can get for SEO.

We designed the e-shop's admin so that every product category in Balistas's extensive portfolio can have its own custom filter settings (for example, customers filter air rifles by completely different parameters than trail cameras).

The selected filters also carry over into the page title, and the e-shop's admin also lets you set whether pages modified this way should be indexed. That's beneficial for SEO — a typical filter customers use for hobby weapons is caliber, for example.

More or less every e-shop offers you suitable packaging or a bag for what you bought — with Balistas, we go a step further. If a customer buys an air rifle and adds a scope and mount to their cart, the e-shop offers them an add-on service known as air rifle zeroing. Here's how it works: a warehouse staff member assembles the air rifle and calibrates it at the shooting range so it shoots accurately. The option to add this service to the cart only becomes available to customers whose cart contains exactly the right combination of products. The e-shop also warns the customer if one of the items needed for zeroing the air rifle is missing from their cart.

You can't stuff an air rifle into a Z-box — hobby weapons are fairly demanding to pack and ship. The Balistas e-shop knows the dimensions and weight of every item and uses that to offer the customer shipping options accordingly — for example, for long rifles it hides Z-boxes and only offers Zásilkovna pickup points. Or it hides Zásilkovna entirely (for instance, if the weight limit is exceeded) and only offers the customer delivery by post.

But that's not all. Based on the product parameters entered, we built an algorithm that tells shipping staff straight away which boxes (from the standard box sizes used in the Balistas warehouse) they should pack the goods into. That makes packing more efficient and speeds up shipping.

The Balistas e-shop makes it possible to create discounted product bundles, combining products customers often buy together — an air rifle, ammunition, and targets, for example. To build these bundles, we created a dedicated module in the admin, which lets the Balistas team easily click together the bundles they want to offer at a discount.

Working in a similar way are product groups, which let related products be grouped together in the admin based on chosen parameters, as if they were variants of one another. Balistas tracks these products separately in the warehouse, but on the e-shop they appear as variants of a single product. The customer on the e-shop then picks a specific item by one or two parameters (size first, say, then color).

• Bulk operations
  let you set a discount on specific products, their categories, or for selected customer groups
• A blog page like building blocks
  administrators assemble blog pages from individual components, tailored to each page's purpose
• One-click blog page copy
  simply copies a blog page from one language version to another, including recommended products and other components
• Support for second-hand products
  customers can buy, at a better price, items that someone unboxed and returned before them
• Integration with Persoo
  a personalized-content tool that automatically picks suitable products for each customer (shown on the homepage, on a logged-in customer's personal page, or in the mini-cart)
• A watchdog with a sense of fair play
  restock notifications are sent to interested customers in the order they activated the alert