Maine Lobster Now is a gourmet lobster company that ships fresh Maine lobsters directly to the doors of their customers. As one of the first of their kind, the company has navigated numerous challenges in launching online seafood delivery at a time when launching any online store posed many challenges—let alone for a highly perishable product like live lobsters. Julian Klenda, founder and CEO, turned first to a custom site, then to Magento (now Adobe Commerce) to build highly customized checkout experiences for customers who wanted their orders delivered to their doorsteps on highly specific dates.
But the customization on Magento required lengthy development times and a hefty budget. As Maine Lobster Now’s business took off, Julian and team needed more streamlined tools, better online security, and a frictionless checkout experience for customers.
Since switching to Shopify, Maine Lobster Now:
- Increased their overall conversion rate by 69% and by 97% on mobile
- Reduced chargebacks due to fraud by 93%
- Built their Shopify store for ~90% less than their Magento store
The story of Maine Lobster Now
For every summer that Julian Klenda can remember, there’s been lobster. On his plate, sure, but also in his father’s lobster wholesale company, Klenda Seafood, where he and other managers competed to see who could pick more lobsters, faster. Then he’d help his father sell their lobsters out of their own trucks to local restaurants.
But fresh Maine lobsters weren’t just popular at the local restaurants, where people would come from all over the world to taste the local fruit of the sea. It was in high demand in the landlocked plains of Kansas, where Julian and his family would visit his dad’s relatives every year.
“These people were crazy for lobsters,” recalls Julian with a smile. “They’d always say to my dad, ‘Dave, are you bringing the lobsters?’ They were so fired up, they couldn’t wait.”
And at other times of year, they’d call up and say, “‘We’re having a graduation party, can you send us some lobsters?’ They just could not get enough of Maine lobsters. And I was just thinking, it’s like these people have no access to lobsters, and they want to order them all the time.”
Julian knew in his gut that there would be a high demand for gourmet, restaurant-quality Maine seafood that could be bought online and shipped anywhere in North America. He enrolled in business school and made an online, direct-to-your-door gourmet lobster delivery service as his final project.
Before long, business was rolling in and taking off. And along with that came great success—and a whole host of puzzles to solve.
The challenge: A product and site experience that demanded customization
The need for a highly customized checkout experience presents challenges
When your business model is premised on the freshness of a highly perishable product, shipping is complex—and expensive. And it’s not just that: fresh lobsters are in many ways an events-based business. People tend to buy for gatherings and celebrations, such as a Fourth of July party, a family reunion, or a graduation. The bigger the order, the more likely this is true—and the more likely the customer wants their lobster to arrive on an exact date to ensure they’re as fresh as possible.
In the early days, customers would write their desired delivery dates in as notes with their orders. Then the team would deal with them manually.
“We used to have folders on the wall for each day where we’d put the orders,” says Julian. “We’d manually type the address into the UPS system.”
Eventually, a Zen Cart-Magento integration helped them manage this with a shipping calendar at checkout. But there were many more nuances to navigate. A weekend or holiday delivery, for instance, demanded higher shipping rates that needed to be communicated seamlessly to their customers.
“For a complex product like ours that’s perishable and needs a delivery date count, something that has all of these requirements weeds out all of these different platforms,” says Julian. “And it can make the cost of entry very high because you have to customize it a lot.”
Which leads us to our second challenge.
Developer dependency and an unsupported app store led to headaches and security issues
To do anything on Magento required the help of a developer. There were decent apps, but they weren’t supported well. They were one-time purchases that wouldn’t necessarily have plugins, so the team often found themselves having to rip out and install totally new ones.
Security and fraud were also huge headaches. As their business took off, more and more big orders would come in, only to turn out to be fraudulent. The Maine Lobster Now team took to calling customers to ensure their orders were real, which wasn’t the best experience on the customer’s end. Nothing was automated. Quite the opposite, it became one team member’s job to just flag and follow up with large orders. The customers weren’t happy having to take all of these extra steps just to prove they had put in a real order. The system wasn’t foolproof, either. Without a unified digital system, it took too long to determine which orders were fraudulent, meaning many slipped through the cracks.
What’s more, Magento itself had many security patches and updates, which often took four to eight weeks for their developer to implement. Despite staying as up to date as possible, the checkout was relatively unstable, leading to slow transactions. Often, the customer would become alarmed as the wheel kept spinning—right after they’d submitted their purchase, wondering if their credit card information was at risk.
All in all, Julian estimates that they spent about a million dollars on Magento between the four developers and creative departments he had to hire.
And yet, “We still couldn't get descriptions to work, we couldn’t get checkout to work. It was just a money pit.”
Driving hard with marketing efforts led to success, but a lack of unification created extra labor
Julian and his team worked hard at ranking for SEO keywords in a tough environment and mastered their email marketing. But they were soon drowning in disconnected platforms—MailChimp, Google, Facebook, SMS. While they began to think beyond channels to the overall marketing plan, it became hard to manage execution of those plans without a unified marketing platform. And it was hard to oversee and allocate spending without that bigger picture of each channel functioning together in view.
The solution: A unified platform with a customizable checkout and a supported app ecosystem
A checkout that fits the needs of business out of the box
“Part of the original reason I went to Magento,” says Julian, “was because I could customize it. But then I realized, we were putting in all of this work when the Shopify checkout was already built the way we needed it to be. Why am I the one personally building this checkout when I could just use their service?”
Once Shopify added the ability to implement a delivery date calendar, Julian was all in. Maine Lobster Now gets all the benefits of the world’s highest-converting checkout, without sacrificing one of their most important features.
The next puzzle to solve was that of speed.
Says Julian, “If you’re an entrepreneur, you really want your visitors to convert easily. You don’t want the checkout process slowing them down.”
And yet the need for speed had to be balanced with the need to reduce fraud.
Now that we're on Shop Pay it's so easy on our end to identify fraud. [Fraudsters] are blocked entirely.
A rich and supported app ecosystem
Remember all of those marketing tools and other apps that Julian and his team were trying to manage through Magento? Now they’ve got access to even better apps through the rich Shopify ecosystem.
The app ecosystem is designed in a way to motivate developers to really make a high quality product for marketers. When you go to launch these things, you just pick what you want, install and configure them, and they work.
“There's a weird maintenance aspect to plugins on other platforms, where you feel really married to this plugin, but then there's a required update that they aren't maintaining for the long run,” says Julian. “What do I do now? That’s just not the case with Shopify because they really did a great job just setting up. The app store is so easy. You just find an app, boom, install.”
It’s now easier than ever for the Maine Lobster Now team to do all of their audience-based marketing in one place using Klaviyo, a marketing app available in the Shopify app ecosystem.
“We don’t want to just market to people on Facebook, we want to do so based on audience,” says Julian. “And we want to market across channels. Klaviyo allows us to send abandoned cart emails, SMS. Whether it's Facebook or Google, I can just take this one group of customers and say, let's market them in a certain way across all channels.”
“Once I knew that was the case, I was totally sold on Shopify. It was so much easier than trying to do it in Magento and other platforms, because we used to have to export the list, then try to sync up, add and subtract people from that list, build our own connection through Zapier. or have a developer do it. Every time somebody signed up, every time somebody unsubscribed, they had to be taken off the list. Trying to make those audiences was a very manual process.”
Those were the big selling points of Shopify. This part of it used to be so difficult, and now it's turnkey. It really is incredible.
The results: Less hassle, more customers—and more quality time to spend with them
The fact that Shopify is able to take something complicated and make it simple, really speaks a lot to the platform.
Delivered ahead of schedule and under budget
Julian and his team have had their fair share of headaches over the years when it comes to website rollouts. Not with Shopify.
“Anybody who tells me they’re doing a website launch and it’s going to cost $20,000, I’m like, ‘Okay, let’s just call that $75,000, because you don’t really know what you’re getting into,’” says Julian.
This was the only website launch I’ve ever done that was ahead of schedule and under-budget. It was that easy.
All in all, Maine Lobster Now’s Shopify store cost them about 90% less than it cost to construct their Magento 2 store. “And we had fewer features than we have on Shopify now. The numbers are staggering,” added Julian.
The customizable checkout is highly functional, fast, and secure
With Shop Pay now installed, fraud management is no longer an issue for the Maine Lobster Now team.
Everything is managed in a single place, making it easy to understand what’s going on, to see chargebacks, orders, shipping, tickets—everything, for that overall picture as well as that zoomed-in view.
All in all, chargebacks due to fraud have fallen from 0.25% of total transactions to 0.025%, a 93% reduction.
“I used to have an agent, and almost her whole job was fraud,” says Julian. “Now she doesn’t have to deal with that anymore. She’s able to focus her time on enhancing customer experience, especially with our bigger customers, making sure everything is the way they want.”
Shopify truly has allowed us to spend more time with our customers and less time managing our store and other technical issues. It creates a better relationship between the customer and the merchant.
Customers have a better experience and convert more
Maine Lobster Now’s new checkout is totally customized to suit the needs of their customers, with a delivery date calendar that seamlessly adjusts shipping costs. It’s quick and easy, unlike the checkout on Magento—there’s no waiting as that little wheel spins.
All of this together means that customers have a better experience.
Overall conversion is up 69%—and it’s 97% on mobile.
They can simply put in an order, watch it instantly process, and not have to submit to the “security test.”
“We want our customers to be excited about their lobsters, not feel like they’re getting pulled over,” jokes Julian. “Now that we’re on Shopify and our fraud numbers have reduced, our customer experience is up, and so are our conversion rates.”
It’s just a better relationship with customers now, which… how do you even measure that?
Watch this space
There’s a lot more to come for Maine Lobster Now. They’ve thought about doing subscriptions for years, but getting the model right for their specific type of product is complex, the kind of thing they haven’t had the bandwidth for when they were just trying to keep their website afloat.
And the technical nature of Shopify’s customizable checkout has them afire with creative possibilities. With checkout blocks, for instance, they’re considering offering more options for customizing what goes into a single box or separated set of boxes. Ask Julian about this, and he’ll tell you with scientific precision about the difference between gel packs and dry ice, how the sweat from defrosting clam chowder packed together with lobster affects the lobster’s freshness—any number of details that only a person steeped deeply in this craft, in his family trade—would know.
He gets to focus on that now, and to continually bring together his and his team’s deep knowledge of lobster and seafood with their innovative minds, knack for creative problem solving, and hard-won technical and marketing knowledge to fulfill their mission of bringing gourmet fresh Maine lobster to all of North America.
And some day, who knows? There’s no telling which distant shores these lobsters are destined for. The future is swimming with possibilities.