Starwest Botanicals

Challenge

For almost 50 years, Starwest Botanicals has been a trusted supplier of herbs, spices, teas and botanical ingredients to consumers, businesses and manufacturers across North America.

As the business continued to grow, so did the complexity of its digital experience.

With an extensive product catalogue, multiple customer types and a wide range of purchasing journeys, the challenge wasn’t attracting customers—it was helping them find the right products, navigate the experience with confidence and move through the buying journey more efficiently.

The existing experience needed to better support product discovery, simplify decision-making and create a clearer path to purchase for both retail and wholesale customers.

Solution

We partnered with Starwest Botanicals to redesign the ecommerce experience around customer behaviour.

Rather than starting with visual design, we focused on understanding how customers were interacting with the website, where friction existed and which journeys had the greatest impact on performance.

This included rethinking the homepage experience, improving site navigation, restructuring collection and category pages, and redesigning product detail pages to make information easier to understand and products easier to discover.

Every decision was made with one objective: helping customers find what they need faster and move forward with greater confidence.

The result was a more intuitive ecommerce experience designed to better serve both new and returning customers while supporting the continued growth of the business.

Results

The redesigned experience delivered measurable improvements across key ecommerce metrics.

Following launch:

• 54% increase in conversion rate
• 25% increase in product engagement
• 38% increase in add-to-cart activity
• 21% increase in completed sales

Demonstrating the impact of simplifying customer journeys, improving product discovery and reducing friction throughout the purchasing experience.

On the product detail page, we identified a set of practical UX/UI and copy improvements to make value clearer and reduce friction at the point of purchase. This included improving how bulk savings are surfaced to encourage larger orders, repositioning pricing so it appears directly below the product name (and within the choice chips) to better match user expectations, and refining the styling of the choice chips to emphasise price and savings more clearly. We also made the monthly subscription option more prominent, with clearer, more compelling language to increase uptake.

We also saw opportunities to make the product page feel more engaging and informative, with a clearer narrative around what makes each product worth buying. We brought sourcing stories into the page by repurposing relevant blog content, introduced icon-led sections to highlight key health benefits at a glance, and added dedicated guidance on preparation and usage — making it easier for customers, especially first-time buyers, to understand how to get the best from the product.