GoBoat LLC
GoBoat
- $99
- a month of app subscription removed, along with the checkout errors it caused
- 3
- separate jobs that one app was doing, each replaced independently
- 5
- emails in the recovery sequence that replaced their three
GoBoat sells inflatable boats, and the store was already on Shopify Plus and already selling when I came in. That is a different job from a rebuild. Nobody wants a redesign of a store that is working ... they want the things that are quietly costing them money to stop.
An app doing three jobs, badly, for ninety-nine dollars a month
The free-gift promotion ran through an app that cost $99 a month and was throwing errors at checkout, which is the worst possible place for an error. It also fired a popup the moment anyone added to cart.
Looking at it properly, the app was doing three separate things that only looked like one: picking a gift, picking a battery, and applying the discount. So each one got replaced on its own ... the pickers became inline UI on the product page, and the discount became a native Shopify automatic discount. Three pieces, each able to ship or roll back without the others.
The app came off. The popup went with it, the checkout errors went with it, and the ninety-nine dollars a month went with it. The merchant turns the pickers on and off from metafields now, without calling me.
A dealer banner that got rewritten twice on launch day
A distributor was unhappy about direct sales in his territory, so boat pages needed to tell a shopper when there was a dealer near them. IP geolocation, nearest dealer, distance, no popups.
It shipped and immediately met the real world: their own team member had a Dallas-registered IP while sitting in Tulsa, so she got a blank space where the banner should be. And a hidden banner is indistinguishable from a broken one.
So it got amended the same day, twice. It always renders now ... generic copy about dealers across the US, which needs no JavaScript and no API and therefore works for everybody including ad-blocked sessions, and a successful lookup upgrades it to the named dealer. When the lookup finds nobody, it offers a ZIP box and a use-my-exact-location button, which is a permission prompt the shopper asked for rather than one thrown at them.
The unglamorous revenue work
A five-email abandoned checkout sequence replacing the three that were there, built around a mystery gift rather than escalating discounts ... at this price point people hesitate over the decision, not the price, and training your customers to abandon carts for a coupon is a bad habit to teach them. An affiliate programme wired into Shopify Collabs. Conversion tracking rebuilt properly, with the customer data attached so enhanced conversions actually work.
None of that shows up in a screenshot, which is exactly why it tends not to get done.
