Today, we’re introducing Replo, a platform that allows merchants, marketers, founders, and agencies to build on Shopify with less dev time. Unlock a new level of customizability for ecommerce — customize every page down to the pixel, and represent your brand and online store the way you need it to.
How it Started
Our journey on Shopify began back in 2018 when we started a drop-shipping business selling apparel from local San Francisco brands. Despite Noah and I having over 10+ years of experience in software development, building on Shopify was super frustrating. The Shopify themes we used were well-designed, but they weren’t customizable and ultimately held us back from the experience and identity we wanted to convey to our customers. Even something as simple as adding product call-outs or updating layouts resulted in hours spent digging around in code.
In the last year, we’ve spoken to hundreds of merchants and we realized that this problem exists at every level in every vertical. Whether it’s building a high-converting landing page, writing editorials with shop-able elements, up-selling bundles on a product page, or launching a look book to showcase a new product line, a brand’s online store is their most valuable real estate, and brands are constantly challenged on how to make their ideas a reality.
What We Learned
- As ecommerce businesses grow, a brand’s story-telling becomes a competitive advantage — content, user experience, and the customer journey become critical. It’s important to make every page of your store represent your brand.
- Current solutions try to solve this problem haphazardly. Page builders and 3rd-party apps do provide some flexibility outside of themes, but aren’t nearly as customizable as they need to be, especially with the growing number of integrations which exist on stores today. Developers inevitably have to get involved to write custom code, which becomes expensive, increases cost and time, and leaves teams with something that’s ultimately even less customizable. Developers are unhappy because they could be working on more interesting problems, but they’re tied down by marketing and design timelines.
- High-performing ecommerce teams today are limited by the tools and resources available to bring their ideas to life.
Building Replo
Our long-term vision for Replo is to democratize web development. We’re standing on the shoulders of tools like Framer, Webflow, Figma, and revolutionary web technologies like React and NextJS, and using them to tackle the messy and exciting world of ecommerce.
Here’s what we want Replo to be —
- Built for serious ecommerce teams. Replo is built for ecommerce teams, serious ecommerce teams. Whether you’re a performance marketer or a designer at an agency, iterating quickly and staying on-brand is key. In Replo, you can copy and paste sections or entire pages with one keyboard shortcut, and save and re-use any section on any page. Brands use Replo’s saved template system to create new pages quickly while keeping their content on-brand.
- Power of the web in the palm of your hands. Replo is bringing the full power of HTML/CSS in an intuitive user interface. Existing apps stop at “good enough”, but it’s never quite exactly there. Every marketing and design team has been there — there’s a certain icon that you can’t set the color on, or an image that you can’t get to animate, or a button that can add a product to the cart but can’t go straight to checkout. Every headache deteriorates the user experience and brand. Replo takes a fundamentally different approach and enables every component to have customizable styles, interactions, and animations.
- Designed for Shopify. No solution exists in a vacuum. Teams today use more and more 3rd-party services for analytics, merchandising, and subscriptions to help drive their business. Any solution that’s useful in this space must integrate seamlessly with tools that brands already love. When you build something on Replo, you have access to all the data you have in Shopify, like product and collection data. When you publish content, pages live directly on Shopify, so your analytics and conversion tracking works out of the box.
Over the past year, we’ve been lucky enough to work with brands of every size to prototype their ideal experience for building pages on Shopify. One example was Studs — their main Piercing Services page (including the interactive piercing locations map) was built completely in Replo, without needing any outside developers.
Here’s what a few of the early brands we’ve worked with had to say about Replo!
"Replo is an incredibly user-friendly app that democratizes custom-theme editing and updating across early-stage Shopify stores." Pricklee Cactus Water
"I’m sure I’m not alone in being disappointed by how challenging it is to build custom Shopify site — basically impossible without hiring an incredibly expensive dev agency. But in comes Replo — exactly what I dreamed Shopify would be… but better!" Fulton
"Replo is by far the best page builder on Shopify! We are now able to easily create landing pages that match our vision exactly. Our non-engineering team members are now able to quickly build (and edit) elevated, on-brand pages to support important business and marketing initiatives without coding." Studs
Get Started With Replo
If you want to learn more, check out our new website at replo.app. We have so much more to share with you as we build out even more features for the Replo editor, so make sure to stay in touch with us on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you have any questions, you can find us at support@replo.app.
If you’d like a demo of our product, schedule some time with me!