ArborScientific – Finding the ‘Cool’ in Science

Science is a polarizing subject for many people throughout the world. Some are intrigued by the ‘unknown’ of science. Yet, others have trouble grasping the material or become easily overwhelmed by the background knowledge required to achieve real scientific insight.
Luckily, the folk over at Arbor Science are infatuated by science and understanding how stuff works. Arbor Scientific is a leading provider of Physics and Physical Science teaching equipment that has been tested and approved by educators recognized for their expertise.
They work with teachers at all levels to find the ‘Cool Stuff’ – unique demonstrations and laboratory tools – and then provide lesson plans, supportive teaching guides, and science teaching supplies to make each learning experience fun and effective.  They want to pass that feeling along to as many people as possible by inspiring them to love to learn the ‘cool’ things like math and science.

If you’re a school teacher, administrator, or have a passion for empowering children, the newly designed Arbor Scientific site offers a clear path to putting instructional tools and devices in the hands that need them most. 
As a non-traditional B2C brand, Arbor Scientific came to Trellis for a website redesign that included countless upgrades during the transition from Magento to Shopify Plus.
Arbor Scientific wanted to make the buying process easier for the thousands of teachers that visit their site. This meant enhancing the design by improving site responsiveness and navigability.




A New Age in Science

Arbor Scientific’s old e-commerce site was on Magento, but issues related to UX, support, and operations compelled the Arbor Scientific team to call in the big guns at Trellis and make a change.  The Arbor Scientific team came to Trellis for help with a site refresh: enhanced design, reconfigured checkout method, and custom tools and capabilities.
With its focused niche and vision, Arbor Scientific has been hugely successful in selling their array of products nationwide- from everything like powerful magnets to gravity-defying utensils and even simpler multimedia like books or software. 

We used Nextopia to enhance product search and discovery. Arbor Scientific would be considered a B2C brand even though they operate in a fashion that is very close to B2B.
We used ShipperHQ to enhance shipping so that Arbor Scientific has the ability to leverage cutting edge shipping rates. They can now integrate with many different carriers as well as create their own custom rates using the power of ShipperHQ, the number one eCommerce shipping experience platform.
Arbor Scientific customers are loyal to the brand and believe in the products they buy. Arbor Scientific products sell themselves and the customers that are interested care about the products they are buying rather than the site they are shopping on. Now Arbor Science’s online customers can find the exact product they’re looking for more quickly and easily.

As a non-traditional B2C brand, it was crucial to custom build a checkout gateway that allows for offline purchasing, bulk pricing, and an option to request quotes. This allows for an increase in information flow and a reduction in cart abandonment. Arbor Science sells to schools, businesses, and individuals so their pricing logic needs to be fluid. 
There is an added ‘Quick Order‘ feature that allows customers to search by SKU or title and add many items to the cart simultaneously. At the same time, the Arbor Science team is able to bulk upload many SKUs simultaneously which benefits both the merchant and consumer.

Cleaner product detail pages allow high-quality photography and product descriptions to shine. This makes the SKUs ‘pop’ and drives engagement. 

The site also uses Shogun for greater content management functionality on the site, making it easier for Arbor Scientific to organize their thousands of products SKUs over time. This ‘drag and drop’ capability gives Arbor Scientific greater site control and increased CMS functionality in the long run. 
This took the ‘COOLSTUFF’ blog to the next level as Arbor Scientific’s loyal teachers and fans can easily browse and identify relevant blogs, lab experiments, activities, and videos to implement during their classroom sessions. This facilitates the flow of information tremendously.

The new site integrates Yotpo reviews so that customers can get viewpoints and reactions from real customers pre-purchase. Additionally, this helps Arbor Science verify the quality of their products and ensure their customers are receiving the best products possible.


Trellis created Migr8 which is a data importing and data migration tool for Shopify that will allow you to bring in any kind of data into Shopify such as products, meta fields, orders, customers, and more. Trellis used this completely customizable & configurable tool for the Arbor Science data migration. It can store multiple import mappings to support multiple CSV formats and is available on the Trellis Store.
The Arbor Science website is now a thing of beauty. The updated design, added functionalities, and improved support are just some of the reasons 2019 has been off to such a hot start for the Arbor Science brand and customers.