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The British Hovercraft Company — Configurable Craft Catalogue & Parts Store on Shopify

A Shopify store for the world's largest manufacturer of recreational and light-commercial hovercraft, exporting to 40+ countries. The build carries two very different commercial motions: hovercraft are hand-built to order and route to enquiry — presented across 13 model pages split by Recreation, Commercial, Race and Electric — while parts, accessories and merchandise transact normally through the cart. Around it sit used-craft listings, commercial hire with RYA-qualified pilots, finance, warranty, a distributor network across six continents, and roughly 90 display currencies.

www.clinikally.com
The British Hovercraft Company — Configurable Craft Catalogue & Parts Store on Shopify
Results at a glance

What changed for Dana's Bakery

2.1× Conversion lift After PDP rebuild
<2s LCP mobile Drop-day spikes
+34% AOV YoY Gifting upsells
12 Drops/year Drop-day ops
The client

The British Hovercraft Company — Configurable Craft Catalogue & Parts Store on Shopify

A Shopify store for the world's largest manufacturer of recreational and light-commercial hovercraft, exporting to 40+ countries. The build carries two very different commercial motions: hovercraft are hand-built to order and route to enquiry — presented across 13 model pages split by Recreation, Commercial, Race and Electric — while parts, accessories and merchandise transact normally through the cart. Around it sit used-craft listings, commercial hire with RYA-qualified pilots, finance, warranty, a distributor network across six continents, and roughly 90 display currencies.

The brief

The challenge, and how we approached it

01

The challenge

Nothing on the main catalogue can be bought online. A hovercraft is hand-built to a buyer's specification, colours and options list, sold on a 40-country export footprint with finance and training attached. But the same business also sells spare parts and merchandise that must check out instantly. One storefront had to run enquiry-led capital sales and straightforward ecommerce without either undermining the other.

02

Our approach

Split the two motions cleanly. Craft models live as content pages organised by use case (Recreation, Commercial, Race, Electric) with engine capacity in every menu label, so buyers filter by specification straight from the navigation — and each ends in a contact route, not a cart. Parts and merchandise sit in real collections with normal checkout. A phone number is pinned to the header, because a £-thousands hand-built purchase closes on a call. Supporting the export side: ~90 display currencies, a distributor page, finance and warranty pages, an exported-countries list, and deployment evidence — Kuwaiti oil fields, Finnish ice rescue, Chilean mine tailings — doing the credibility work that specs alone can't.

What we built

Six capabilities shipped for Dana's Bakery

Each one solves a specific part of the brief above.

ZIP-gated shipping

Real-time validation prevents invalid ZIP purchases from entering cart

Drop architecture

Pre-staged inventory with countdown, sold-out gates, and waitlist

Gifting flow

Message cards, recipient addressing, scheduled delivery, gift wrap

Perishable inventory

Daily inventory sync with cold-chain capacity constraints

Drop-day performance

Theme architecture handles 20× traffic spikes without latency

Recurring orders

Holiday subscription flow for repeat gifters

How it ran

10 weeks build, in four stages

Every engagement runs the same four stages, so you always know what happens next and what you owe us at each one.

Stage 1

Audit and scope

We review the current theme, apps and analytics, then write a fixed-scope SOW with named deliverables and a date.

Stage 2

Design and build

Work happens in a dev store on a Git-backed workflow. You get a preview link from week one, not a reveal at the end.

Stage 3

QA and launch

Cross-browser and device QA, redirect map, analytics verification, then a launch window agreed with you rather than dropped on you.

Stage 4

Hypercare

Fourteen to sixty days of included post-launch support while real traffic finds the edge cases.

The outcome

Where Dana's Bakery landed

Conversion is up 2.1× after the PDP rebuild, AOV is up 34% year-over-year thanks to gifting upsells, and drop days are now smooth — zero downtime across 12 drops in the past year.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Every drop day was a stress event before. Now they're just a Tuesday. The team built us infrastructure we can actually grow on.

Founder British Hovercraft
Tech stack

What this project runs on

The exact platform, services and integrations behind the build.

Commerce platform

  • Shopify Plus
  • Launchpad
  • Shopify Functions
  • Online Store 2.0

Engineering

  • Custom ZIP validator

Growth and operations

  • Klaviyo
  • ShipBob