Safari Seekers sells premium rooftop tents and overland gear. The buying journey isn't impulse — it's researched, considered, compared. Their site needed to do heavy product storytelling AND sell. We built it custom, hand-coded, and engineered to handle both.
Safari Seekers had two problems a standard Shopify build wouldn't solve. First, rooftop tents are high-consideration purchases — buyers spend 20-30 minutes on a product page comparing specs, seeing real-world footage, reading reviews. Standard Shopify templates aren't built for that depth of storytelling. Second, the brand's voice is rugged and specific, and most themes wash that out.
They came to us wanting a site that felt more like a custom brand experience than a generic e-comm store, but still handled payments, shipping, inventory and customer accounts. A bespoke HTML build with Stripe-powered checkout turned out to be the right call.
We mapped the research-heavy customer journey first. A rooftop tent buyer wants: (1) size and vehicle compatibility, (2) real-world setup footage, (3) specs vs competitors, (4) shipping costs and lead times, (5) financing options. Each of those became a dedicated section on the product page instead of getting buried in a tabs component.
On the platform side, we chose a custom HTML front-end with Stripe Payment Links handling checkout. This gave us unlimited design control without losing compliant PCI-DSS payment handling. Inventory is managed through a lightweight JSON-driven back-end we built specifically for the catalogue.
Built on Custom HTML / CSS / Stripe. Everything below was delivered in-house — no outsourcing, no handoffs, no excuses.
Five fully custom product pages, each ~3,000 words of product storytelling, technical specs, comparison tables, embedded YouTube setup walkthroughs, and a financing calculator. Stripe Checkout handles payments. ShipStation integrated for fulfilment. The whole site loads in under 1 second on 4G.
Time on product page increased 38% — buyers were actually reading the specs and watching the setup videos instead of bouncing. Mobile conversion rate matched desktop for the first time in the brand's history. Cart abandonment dropped because the financing calculator set expectations before checkout instead of revealing cost surprises at the last step.
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Average page load (4G) | 0.9s |
| Product page time-on-page | +38% |
| Mobile vs desktop conversion parity | 1:1 |
| Cart abandonment rate | -24% |
| Enquiry-to-order ratio | +31% |
Whether you're launching, replatforming, or scaling — we'll build you a site that actually converts. One team. Perth-based. No outsourcing.