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Joselito BigCommerce Modernization: Returning a Luxury Food Brand to Platform Standard
BigCommerce theme rebuild, UX and UI redesign, checkout standardization, restaurant reservation integration and scope discipline for a premium Spanish food brand's international ecommerce store.
Project Summary
Joselito sells premium Spanish cured ham and related products online to an international audience. The store already existed on BigCommerce, but it had accumulated the kind of debt that follows a launch under time pressure: a theme carrying problems forward from an earlier design, a checkout that had been customized to accommodate one feature, cart and checkout styling that no longer matched the rest of the site, and product content structured in a way that made routine changes harder than they needed to be.
Elogic Commerce led the engagement from requirements gathering through UI design and implementation. The work covered a new theme built from scratch, a redesign of the home, listing and product pages under a mobile-first approach, the return of checkout to the BigCommerce standard, a reusable static page template for the brand’s editorial content, and integration with the reservation system behind Joselito’s physical restaurant.
The defining characteristic of this engagement was not what was built. It was what Elogic Commerce recommended against building.
Key Outcomes
27%
faster page load following replacement of the legacy BigCommerce theme.
+8%
checkout completion rate following the move back to the standard BigCommerce checkout.
+12%
mobile conversion rate following the mobile-first redesign.
1
custom checkout implementation removed, returning the store to BigCommerce's supported checkout architecture.
About the Client
Joselito is a premium Spanish food brand whose positioning depends heavily on presentation. The product is expensive, it is bought as a gift as often as for personal consumption, and the brand’s story about curing, provenance and craft is a material part of what customers are paying for.
That places unusual demands on the storefront. A luxury food brand’s product page has to carry a long tail of information, including format, ingredients, curing, preparation, consumption, tasting notes, nutritional values, preservation and transport, without turning into a specification sheet that undermines the presentation. The brand also operates physical locations, a restaurant and two kiosks, which the website has to represent alongside the online catalog.
The store sells internationally, with the site presented in multiple languages.
Project Complexity
Business Challenge
01
A storefront that no longer matched the brand's positioning
For a product sold on craft and provenance, presentation is not decoration. The existing design was not carrying the brand.
02
A theme accumulating problems rather than shedding them
The existing theme dragged issues forward from the previous design, adding weight that affected performance and made changes harder to reason about.
03
A non-standard checkout maintained for one feature
The customized checkout existed to support gift messaging. It worked, but it meant carrying a bespoke checkout indefinitely for a single requirement.
04
Content maintenance that required technical involvement
Static pages, product attributes and multilingual content each required more intervention than they should have, which slowed the marketing team down.
05
Physical locations invisible to the digital channel
The restaurant and kiosks had no proper representation on the site, and the restaurant needed reservations and menus.
06
A finite budget against a wish list
The requested scope exceeded what the available budget could responsibly cover, which meant the engagement had to begin with prioritization rather than with design.
Deciding What Not to Build
The most useful thing Elogic Commerce did on this project was to argue against parts of the requested scope.
Joselito requested a payment link inside the customer account for individual orders, using its existing Stripe integration. Elogic Commerce recommended against building it because Stripe already provided a manual payment link workflow and customer service could handle the occasional request. The proposed feature would therefore automate a low-frequency process while introducing Stripe-specific logic that would have to be revisited if the payment provider changed. The feature was removed from scope.
The store was presented in ten languages, with seven retained for the target setup. The existing architecture required a separate product record for each language, creating duplication in the BigCommerce backend. Elogic Commerce recommended introducing a translation layer that would allow a single product, category or CMS page to carry its translations. The recommendation included the actual trade-off: an initial setup cost plus a recurring licence fee based on the number of languages. Joselito chose not to include that investment in this phase, and Elogic Commerce documented the recommendation rather than quietly absorbing it into the estimate.
Joselito needed a general menu and a wine list available on the restaurant page. The obvious approach was to build them as pages. Elogic Commerce recommended PDFs served through a file management app instead, on two grounds: menu content maintained as web pages tends to produce layout errors across devices and requires a technician to review each change, whereas PDFs let the marketing team update menus without engineering involvement. This gave Joselito one content asset for both the website and the restaurant’s physical QR codes, while allowing the marketing team to replace the files without engineering involvement.
Rather than carrying a bespoke checkout indefinitely for a single gift message requirement, Elogic Commerce recommended returning to the BigCommerce standard checkout and incorporating the gift message within the supported checkout structure. This removed unnecessary customization and reduced the amount of checkout code Joselito would have to maintain.
Elogic Commerce's Solution
A new theme built from scratch
Rather than continuing to adapt the existing theme, Elogic Commerce removed it and built a new theme from scratch to remove inherited design and implementation issues. The existing theme carried forward problems from Joselito’s previous design that needed to be eliminated rather than worked around, and the new theme was scoped to remove elements that added weight without serving a business purpose.
Mobile-first UI across the purchase journey
Design work proceeded mobile-first, with a restructured header and footer built on an information architecture derived from UX analysis, and a simple line iconographic system consistent with the brand’s register.
Home received a slider that Joselito’s own team populates with top products and marketing priorities, a featured products grid, an entry point into the brand’s editorial section, a category grid weighted toward product imagery, and newsletter and social placement.
The product page was structured around the tension in the brief: high-quality imagery and a sticky price and call to action that follow the user, with the twelve information categories collapsed into an accordion so that depth of information does not translate into depth of scroll. A cross-selling grid sits below.
The product listing page deliberately omits filters, because the category menu already performs that function for a catalog of this size. On mobile, products are presented one at a time rather than in a slider, so each item gets the presentation a premium product needs and the tap target stays comfortable.
Cart, mini-cart, checkout and thank you pages were not redesigned bespoke. They follow the BigCommerce standard structure with the approved brand styles applied, which resolves the visual inconsistency without taking the store off the platform’s supported path.
A reusable template for brand storytelling
The brand’s editorial content, covering history, commitments and know-how, was restructured into cascading sections of images and titles. Elogic Commerce built one static page template containing text, image and video blocks, so that each new page Joselito needs can be assembled from available blocks with the inapplicable ones hidden. Content ownership sits with Joselito’s team rather than returning to engineering for each page.
Physical locations and reservations
A general physical points page and a location detail page were designed and implemented from wireframes supplied by Joselito, covering the restaurant and two kiosks. The restaurant page carries three actions: reserve a table, integrated with CoverManager’s reservation system, check the menu and check the wine list, both served as PDFs.
Customer accounts
User registration was activated on the BigCommerce standard, including secure registration and login forms and password recovery. Beyond order history and a faster repeat-purchase path, customer accounts give Joselito an authenticated customer relationship that anonymous checkout does not provide.
Responsive implementation and QA
Layout was implemented across four desktop resolutions and one mobile resolution, with QA performed against the same set. Browser and resolution scope was defined explicitly, allowing QA coverage to be estimated against a defined test matrix.
Results & Business Impact
Technical
Page load improved by 27% following replacement of the legacy theme with a new theme built from scratch to eliminate inherited design and implementation issues rather than working around them. The checkout returned to the BigCommerce standard structure, removing one custom checkout implementation from the estate Joselito has to maintain and keeping the store on the platform's supported path.
Operational
Editorial pages are assembled by Joselito's own team from reusable blocks in a single static page template, with inapplicable blocks hidden, rather than requiring an engineering request per page. Restaurant menus are served as PDFs the marketing team can replace directly. The same PDF URLs serve the QR codes on the restaurant's physical menus, giving Joselito one content asset covering both the website and the restaurant floor.
Commercial
Checkout completion rate increased 8% following the return to the standard BigCommerce checkout, and mobile conversion rate increased 12% following the mobile-first redesign. The storefront presentation was rebuilt around the brand's positioning, with the product page structured to carry twelve information categories without compromising the presentation a premium product requires. Customer accounts were activated, giving Joselito an authenticated customer relationship that anonymous checkout does not provide.
Strategic
Requested features were assessed on value against maintenance cost rather than accepted wholesale. The payment link was removed from scope, the multilingual investment was documented with its true recurring cost and deferred by the client, and the restaurant menus were solved without custom development. Budget was redirected toward the theme rebuild and redesign, where Elogic Commerce identified the highest-value problems to solve.
Capabilities Demonstrated
01
BigCommerce theme development, including full theme replacement on a live store
02
Mobile-first UX and UI design for premium direct-to-consumer retail
03
Information architecture for content-heavy product pages
04
Checkout standardization and de-customization
05
Reusable content template design for marketing self-service
06
Third-party reservation integration with CoverManager
07
Stripe payment flow assessment and build-versus-buy recommendation
08
Multilingual architecture assessment with total cost of ownership stated
09
Scope prioritization against a fixed budget, including recommending against requested features
When This Solution Is a Good Fit
01
You are on BigCommerce and willing to work with the platform's standard checkout rather than against it.02
Your storefront problem is presentation, content structure and maintainability rather than a fundamental platform mismatch.03
You want your marketing team to create pages and update content without raising engineering tickets.04
You would rather hear that a requested feature is not worth building than have it silently priced into an estimate.05
Your third-party requirements can be met through established integrations rather than bespoke systems.06
You can define browser and resolution scope up front so that QA effort is estimated against something real.Planning Your BigCommerce Redesign?
On a store that already exists, the redesign question is usually entangled with three others: what to rebuild, what to standardize back to the platform, and what not to build at all. Getting those right before design starts is worth more than any individual feature on the list. Talk to Elogic Commerce about scoping your BigCommerce redesign.