Over the past 11 years, Grove Collaborative has built a name for itself as conscious consumers’ go-to supplier for everyday essentials. And that hard-won name has been built on top of a homegrown tech stack that supported the brand’s robust ecommerce and subscription ecosystem.
But recently the brand realized it had outgrown its in-house tech and began a process that many today are undertaking — shifting from custom-built digital commerce systems to best-in-breed third-party technology, a.k.a. “replatforming.”
For its replatform, Grove selected Shopify for ecommerce operations, Ordergroove for subscriptions tech and Tapcart to support its mobile app. With these shifts, Grove hopes to not only improve the customer experience but also realize tangible gains in site conversion and customer lifetime value.
Grove took Retail TouchPoints behind the scenes of its replatforming process and shared some learnings as the company gets ready to launch its new systems early next year.
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Key Business Shift: Expanding Beyond Subscriptions
Since its founding over a decade ago, Grove Collaborative has emerged as a leader in the arena of sustainable consumer products, and it recently became the world’s first plastic-neutral retailer. The company is a certified B Corporation and a Public Benefit Corporation, trusted by conscientious customers looking for high-performing products that are also planet-friendly. The site now features more than 240 brands across household cleaning, laundry, baby and pet care, as well as its new health and wellness vertical.
For much of its history, Grove has been a subscription-first business focused on driving automated recurring orders, but as the demand for sustainable household products has grown, the company has begun to move away from that model. Customers now have more ways than ever to shop Grove, although subscriptions are still part of the mix, and this shift is part of what prompted Grove’s decision to replatform now.
“When we started Grove Collaborative the landscape was very different, and it made sense at that time to build our own ecomm experience,” said Chris Clark, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Grove Collaborative in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “But since then, two things have happened. First, the third-party ecommerce ecosystem has become much more sophisticated. Shopify in particular has focused on enterprise for the last two years and made a lot of progress. The level of customization, and the services and support offerings around it, means that we can confidently migrate and support all of the elements and practices specific to Grove that we uniquely deliver for our customers.
“Second, as of the first quarter of 2024, we are no longer a subscription-first business, and we have made Grove more broadly appealing by offering more ways to buy and shop,” Clark added. “With these changes, the ‘quirks’ of how we go to market have diminished, our experience is more compatible with a lot of ecommerce best practices, and we are better able to leverage a lot of those ‘out of the box’ best practices with Shopify.”
The company initiated the process of migrating its customer and subscriber base to Shopify, which will serve as the foundation of the replatform, in July 2024. Grove expects the migration to all three new platforms to be completed in the first quarter of 2025.
“For most large migrations, there’s a courtship period; you evaluate capabilities, build a proof-of-concept and spend time analyzing the unique parts of your own business,” said Clark. “Then, at some point, you make the decision, sign a contract and it’s, ‘Let’s get this thing live!’ We are regularly in touch with other brands of similar size to Grove and it is invariably true that these projects are about six months of work, give or take, once you decide to take the jump.”
Seeking Suppliers that Stay Current with Industry Trends
Once Grove decided to replatform it brought in Brad Dey, CEO of Dey’s End Consulting to help understand the ecosystem and evaluate available technologies, of which there are many these days.
Each of the platforms Grove will be using was chosen not just for its potential to unlock revenue growth and operational efficiency, but also because of the suppliers’ track records in staying up to date with new functionality. The company expects a number of enhancements to result from its new partnerships, including:
- More flexibility and the potential to easily scale ecommerce infrastructure when needed through the move to Shopify, allowing for continuous innovation in the online experience and offering;
- An enhanced subscriber experience by partnering with Ordergroove — including the ability to experiment with new subscriber offerings, make order management easier, personalize communications and test new subscriber incentives — ultimately increasing recurring revenue;
- A decrease in time and money spent on app maintenance with the new Tapcart-based mobile app, allowing the Grove team to instead focus their time on merchandising, promotions and communicating with customers; and
- Deeper access across the board to customer insights in order to better tailor future offerings and personalize the experience.
“Fundamentally, we will no longer have to invest so heavily just to stay current and we can free up valuable internal resources to refocus on innovation, growth and points of differentiation,” said Clark. “We will still retain an in-house team, but their focus doesn’t have to be on maintaining Google best practices, updating code or integrating with platforms like TikTok. Instead, their focus can be on enriching our product selection catalog with better sustainability information or educating customers about the amazing work we do around addressing plastic waste.”
Getting Back to Grove’s Core Mission
In addition to enabling new customer-facing capabilities, Grove expects to reduce the time and money it spends on maintaining its home-grown tech stack, which has required increasing levels of investment over the years to stay current.
“It’s no surprise that a company like Shopify, with 2,000+ software engineers, can get more done than our in-house engineering team,” said Clark. “We’re in the business of offering the best assortment of healthy, sustainable CPG products to our customers — we’re not in the software development business. This replatform allows us to focus on that mission.
“This is an interesting move given that it’s not driven by one specific factor or problems with our existing experience,” he noted. “In fact, we’re very proud of what we’ve built and the experience we are delivering today, but over the coming months and years we have a lot to gain by using a technology platform that is subsidized by all of the other Shopify customers and by the increased focus on what makes Grove great.”
However, when Q1 2025 rolls around, customers might not even be aware of the shift — and that will be the ultimate sign of success, said Clark: “At launch our goal is to have an experience that is as similar to our current experience as possible, because this is what our customers have come to expect,” he said. “Of course, there will be a myriad of small differences and changes — but this is not about a relaunch or a rebrand of the experience — and this offers an opportunity for us to eliminate quirks in our experience. What customers will notice the most is not what happens at launch, but the acceleration of improvements that come in 2025 and into the future.”
