A Custom Storefront That Doubled Atkinson Outfitters' Website Traffic

The opportunity

Atkinson Outfitters is a family run outdoor store in Hartington, a few minutes north of Kingston. They sell hunting, fishing, camping and outdoor gear, renew Ontario hunting and fishing licences over the counter, and ship across Canada through their online store. The business has two sides: a shop staffed by people who hunt and fish, and an e-commerce site that reaches customers well past Eastern Ontario.

The online store was built on Shopify. It worked, but it was holding the business back.

Where the old store fell short

The old storefront pushed online sales and shipping first and hid what makes Atkinson Outfitters a local shop. Nothing told you that you could walk in, talk to someone who knows the gear, and pick up your tags at the counter. For a store whose reputation is built on that counter, that was a real gap.

The structure worked against customers too. Categories were fractured. There were no proper brand or sub-category pages, so a customer looking for a specific line of gear had nowhere to land and search engines had little to index. The product pages were cluttered and hard to read, which made browsing and buying harder than it needed to be.

A custom front end on Shopify

We built a custom front end on top of their existing Shopify back end. Shopify still runs the cart, checkout and payments. Everything the customer sees and searches is ours to control, so we could fix the structure and the design without moving the store off a platform that already works for them.

The redesign gives the shop and the online store equal footing. The homepage now leads with both: shop online and ship across Canada, or visit the Hartington store for licensing, tags and gear off the shelf. Store hours, location and the licensing desk sit up front instead of buried in the footer.

Before After

Licensing is a big reason people make the drive to Hartington, so we gave it a page of its own. It sets out what to bring, what the shop issues, from Outdoors Cards to hunting and fishing tags and draws, and answers the questions staff used to field over the phone. Clear, structured content like this earns its own search traffic and takes pressure off the counter.

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A structure customers and search engines can follow

We rebuilt the category structure with real department, brand and sub-category pages, so both customers and search engines can find their way around. A shopper looking for a specific brand now lands on a page built for it, with filtering by activity, size and colour and a short write-up that tells the brand’s story.

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Those pages do double duty. Customers get a faster path to the right gear, and Google gets clean, well-labelled pages to index. That is where most of the gain in organic search comes from.

Product pages built for outdoor gear

We rewrote the product pages to be clean and readable, with the details that matter for outdoor gear. For regulated products, the pages handle the Possession and Acquisition Licence check clearly, and per store stock shows up front so a customer knows whether an item is on the shelf in Hartington before making the drive.

Before After

Automating stock and pricing from the point of sale

Keeping a web store current by hand is a job nobody has time for. We wrote an automation that links Atkinson Outfitters’ point of sale system to the web shop. Per store inventory counts and pricing now update on their own. When something sells at the counter or a price changes in the POS, the website follows without a staff member touching it.

That removed a standing source of manual work and kept online stock and pricing accurate, which matters when a customer is deciding whether to order online or come in.

The result

Since the redesign, Atkinson Outfitters has more than doubled their website traffic. The cleaner structure and rewritten product pages improved their visibility in search, and the clearer layout has lifted conversions from the visitors who arrive.

The site now matches the business. Customers can shop online with confidence, or see that there is a real shop in Hartington worth the drive, with staff who know the gear and a licensing desk ready when they get there.

If your online store is holding your business back, or a platform’s stock theme is boxing you in, a custom front end can fix the structure and the design without starting over. We build custom websites, store integrations and back-office automation for businesses across Kingston and Eastern Ontario. See our website and app development and business growth and automation work, or visit the live store to see the result.