Cousins Maine Lobster
Shopify Plus Website
Cousins Maine Lobster is one of the biggest restaurant success stories in the past decade with 40+ restaurants and food trucks nationwide. They needed a partner that could not only reimagine their digital appearance, but navigate the complexities that had previously shut down past attempts at direct to consumer eCommerce.
Shopify Plus
Conspire Agency
Thu, 28 Jul 2026
Shop from an array of fresh seafood
from Maine, and get it delivered to your doorstep overnight.
Services
Web design and development, application development
Deliverables
Headless eCommerce website, custom checkout, upsell & shipping applications
Technologies
Shopify Plus
Visit site
Overview
We built a high performance headless website that combined both the restaurant and eCommerce components into a unified website. Our strategic solutions resulted in higher customer engagement with physical locations as well as made direct to consumer sales possible, resulting in millions of net new revenue.
Discovery
Art/stylistic website direction
Website design & development
Custom application development
Art Direction
As with all redesigns, our first crucial task was to define the art direction. While Cousins Maine Lobster had branding in place and had invested time in developing out their physical presence (ie. menus, food packaging), their existing digital presence was very basic.
The eventual art direction we landed on really brings out the character of the brand though use of thoughtful accents and dynamic layouts. It needed to feel rich in content, while remaining clean + modern, easy to navigate and an extension of the brand's existing physical presence.
Design & Storytelling
The story behind Cousins Maine Lobster is not only engrained in its namesake, but an important reason why people choose Cousins over any other lobster roll stand. This story needed to be injected throughout the site. We worked with their team to come up with compelling copywriting and craft it into different portions of the website.
Quantity Discounts & Upsells
Cousins offers quantity discounts which adjust the price based on how many are added to cart. The more that are added to cart the cheaper the price per unit becomes. Upon hitting add to cart out custom upsell pops up and allows users to one-click add to cart upsell items. Savings is clearly displayed throughout the both processes.
In addition to the main site build, we were tasked with figuring out how Zia could drive more revenue with trade partners through an integrated sign-up and ordering experience. This resulted in a custom trade application that allows B2B customers to login to the same site, but have a discounted trade partner shopping experience - all flowing into the same Shopify CMS for ease of customer service management.
Location & Event Finder
Our goal for the portion of the site focused on Cousins' physical presence was to make it easier for customers to engage with the brand. Given that food trucks are always on the move, we wanted to reimagine the discovery process into a more customer centric solution.
We felt the best way to do this would be to allow customers to enter their zip code and in return receive recommendations on which locations would be having events in their area that week. It was not an easy feat to accomplish given that food trucks had multiple events per day and customers could live in any zip code in the USA - ultimately this turned out to be a much more user friendly experience and resulted in higher conversions to food + restaurant pages.
Food Trucks are the heart and soul of Cousins Maine Lobster. Pictured here is the location finder pages we built to allow customers to easily navigate to the closest CML food truck.
Custom Checkout Experience
Our biggest accomplishment of this project was in building a sophisticated custom checkout that made possible their multimillion dollar direct to consumer business. We later switched over to Shopify's checkout when Checkout Extension capabilities were added to the platform.
Live lobster needs to be delivered door-to-door in 24 hours otherwise all is lost. This means that delivery dates presented to customers and ship dates had to be 100% accurately integrated with actual UPS pickup + overnight delivery. If estimates were off, this would result in possibly
hundreds of dollars lost per order and would essentially crush the possibilities of this sales channel all together.
