A Decade-Long Partnership: Scaling CHOQ® from $2M to $9M in Annual Sales
CHOQ® is a privately owned research, development, and manufacturing company that produces nutritional supplements sold through its WooCommerce website — most often to men in their late 20s through 30s who want to boost their energy and vitality. Based in Austin, Texas, CHOQ® uses a rigorous, science-based, herbalist approach to create safe and natural supplements. It stands out from competitors through complete transparency about the ingredients it uses. That approach has earned CHOQ® a 4.9/5 Trustpilot rating and a place among the top five sellers of natural supplements in the U.S.
What began as a request to keep the site online during a high-traffic sales event has grown into a partnership spanning more than a decade — with Mode Effect serving as CHOQ®’s ongoing technology and digital marketing partner through years of sustained growth.
Services provided: WooCommerce Development · Website Hosting · Ongoing Technical & Platform Management · SEM/SEO & Google Ads (Performance Max)
The Challenge
Like a lot of fast-growing e-commerce brands, CHOQ® didn’t expect things to take off as quickly as they did. The site had been built with a mix of freelancers and DIY methods and launched on a traditional shared host — infrastructure that wasn’t ready for the volume the brand started to see.
The breaking point came during peak sales periods, when a surge of traffic overwhelmed the site during a major holiday event. On top of the stability problem, the site was slow for mobile customers — who made up 70–80% of visitors and purchases — putting the majority of CHOQ®’s revenue at risk every time performance lagged.
The pattern was clear: freelancers and general web development shops weren’t equipped to support a high-volume WooCommerce store. CHOQ® needed a partner who specialized in it.
The Solution
That’s where Mode Effect came in.
Most companies in CHOQ®’s position aren’t looking to reinvent their store overnight — they want a partner who can stabilize what they’ve built while protecting the traffic and sales they already have. That’s squarely in our wheelhouse. We take the time to understand a company and its goals, then build a strategy to streamline and optimize its online presence.
Our first priority was stability. Mode Effect set up and configured cloud-hosted servers engineered to absorb traffic spikes without compromising performance — putting an end to the crashes during peak periods.
From there, senior software engineer Kevin Brent and the Mode Effect team mapped out a redesign focused on speed and mobile responsiveness. That meant trimming asset-heavy features — like performance-draining video animations — that were slowing the experience on mobile, and streamlining several product pages so the site loaded fast for the majority-mobile audience.
We also helped CHOQ® get more out of its email marketing by introducing drip campaigns — a sequence of targeted, pre-written emails triggered by customer activity to bring shoppers back to the site, complete a purchase, or subscribe for regular deliveries. Mode Effect built out a 52-email flow, one per week, matched to CHOQ®’s voice, and launched a subscription service to drive repeat purchases.
One of the highest-impact projects was a complete overhaul of the checkout experience. CHOQ® had been running the traditional, multi-step WooCommerce checkout — the kind that walks a shopper through several screens between cart and confirmation. Mode Effect collapsed that entire flow into a single-step checkout: one screen on desktop, and an equally streamlined single-step experience on mobile, where the majority of CHOQ®’s buyers actually are. Fewer taps, less scrolling, and no page-to-page hand-offs meant far less friction at the exact moment it matters most — and for a mobile-first customer base, that faster, cleaner path to purchase turned out to be a game-changer for converting visitors into customers.
What set the engagement apart, though, was what happened after the initial project wrapped. Rather than hand the site back and move on, CHOQ® kept Mode Effect on through an ongoing retainer for technical and platform management. Over the years, that has meant continually optimizing the store as WooCommerce itself evolved — including migrating to High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS), which moves order data into dedicated, indexed database tables so the store stays fast as order volume climbs — alongside a steady cadence of performance improvements.
Just as critical is the work customers never see. Mode Effect keeps the platform secure and stable through proactive, timely maintenance and by hardening and managing the cloud-hosted servers we set up for CHOQ® — the kind of ongoing stewardship that prevents the next outage rather than reacting to it. More recently, we expanded into paid acquisition, implementing Google Ads with Performance Max campaigns to reach new customers and fuel growth beyond CHOQ®’s existing channels.
The Results
Over the course of the partnership, CHOQ® has grown from roughly $2 million to $9 million in annual sales — with Mode Effect as its technology and digital marketing partner throughout that climb.
The technical foundation behind that growth matters just as much. The problem that started it all is gone: CHOQ® now moves through its busiest holiday and sales periods without the crashes and slowdowns that once put revenue at risk. And because the platform is proactively maintained, kept current with WooCommerce advances like HPOS, and running on secured cloud-hosted servers, it stays fast and stable as order volume climbs — rather than degrading as the business scales.
The rebuilt checkout has been a standout win. By replacing WooCommerce’s traditional multi-step flow with a single-step checkout — one screen on desktop and a tight, tap-friendly equivalent on mobile — Mode Effect removed friction at the most decisive point in the buying journey. For CHOQ®’s mobile-first audience, that streamlined checkout has been a game-changer for turning shoppers into paying customers.
Is your store ready to grow past your technical challenges? We can help.