Celebrating the Best in Ecommerce: Meet the 2025 Experience Award Winners

We’re thrilled to announce the winners of our inaugural ButterCMS Ecommerce Experience Awards, recognizing the most innovative ecommerce teams using ButterCMS today. These awards honor standout ecommerce customers who’ve gone above and beyond to create high-performing, customer-centered shopping experiences that scale, convert, and delight.

Celebrating ecommerce that delivers

What does it take to build a truly exceptional ecommerce experience?

Every 2025 winner has a storefront that loads fast and supports the flexibility to launch new campaigns, roll out updates, and localize content without adding development overhead. They deliver personalized content based on region, behavior, and customer preferences. And they keep branding consistent across every digital touchpoint, from product pages to emails to mobile apps. 

But performance factors alone aren’t enough. Yes, a great ecommerce experience feels seamless to the shopper, but it also feels manageable to the people behind it. The brands we’re celebrating this year didn’t just focus on their customers. They focused on empowering their teams with the systems and tools to move faster and build for long-term, sustainable growth, together.

What makes a winning experience? 

We weren’t just looking for beautiful sites (though there are plenty of those). We looked for ecommerce teams using ButterCMS in creative, meaningful ways that solve real problems, remove friction, and set a new standard for what’s possible in ecommerce.

Here’s what we evaluated:

• Performance and speed: Is the site fast and reliable? Can it handle content-rich pages or product catalogs smoothly without slowing down?
  

• Customer experience: Is the customer journey intuitive, personalized, and helpful across every touchpoint?
  

• Innovation: Did the team use their tech stack to do something new? Or did they solve a tough problem in a clever or creative way?
  

• Team story: What challenges did the team face, and how did they overcome them? What makes their process or approach inspiring?

Let’s meet the teams raising the bar.

Meet the 2025 winners 

Best Mobile Ecommerce

This award celebrates a storefront that delivers fast, seamless, mobile-first commerce. 

Winner: Tropical Smoothie Cafe

Why we’re impressed: Tropical Smoothie Cafe serves up a mobile experience as fresh as its menu, with the perfect blend of convenience, speed, and brand flavor.

Key standout elements: 

• Marketing teams manage content independently

• Decreased time-to-market for new campaigns and features

• Their mobile checkout is as smooth and refreshing as their Mango Monsoon™ smoothie. 

We asked Braden Turner, VP of Digital and Restaurant Technology, how ButterCMS has helped their mobile experience. Here’s what he said.

“ButterCMS has given us an easy-to-use CMS platform that powers key components of our mobile app experience. It’s reduced our need for coding content changes and sped up our time to market, which has allowed our teams to focus on other enhancements to our mobile app.” 

- Braden Turner, Vice President, Digital and Restaurant Technology, Tropical Smoothie Cafe

Best Scalable Brand Architecture

Winner: In-Shape Fitness

This award honors a brand fueling growth through franchise, white-label, or acquisition-based expansion. 

Why we’re impressed: In-Shape Fitness keeps its storefront in peak condition. With 63 clubs across 16 regions, they manage multiple brand experiences from a single ButterCMS instance, no sweat. It’s a high-rep, low-friction operation that blends flexibility, speed, and brand consistency like a seasoned pro.

Key standout elements:

• Reusable content blocks for classes, events, promos, and schedules

• Custom content per region, club, or campaign

• Fast launches and updates across locations without dev wait time

• A multi-location content strategy that’s as strong as its members

Best Regional Ecommerce Experience

Winner: Flow Automotive

This award celebrates a storefront demonstrating excellence in managing multi-region, multi-brand content and customer experience. 

Why we’re impressed: Flow Automotive runs like a well-oiled machine, driving digital experiences that feel personal, cohesive, and completely on brand, no matter the zip code. It’s also a custom build, finely tuned for power and performance. With a strong community presence, they’ve mastered the art of localization at scale. 

Key standout elements:

• Marketing teams can easily create dealership-specific content without the engineering team

• Every page looks and feels like Flow Automotive, no matter the region

• Their setup supports growth into new markets or regions without a full rebuild

Flow Automotive delivers the kind of multi-region experience that puts the customer firmly in the driver’s seat. Here’s what Ashley Bullin, Digital Marketing Manager, has to say:

“Flow Auto has a very strong community presence across different cities. Being able to highlight what we’re doing, what we have to offer, jobs that need to be filled, specific used cars in that area… it’s exciting for us to use ButterCMS to launch market pages and highlight our local presence.”

- Ashley Bullin, Digital Marketing Manager, Flow Automotive

Best Interactive Product-Selection Experience

Winner: BOXT

This award honors a storefront that delivers a fast, seamless ecommerce experience across every touchpoint. 

Why we’re impressed: BOXT has reimagined the process of selecting and installing home energy solutions, making the process as cool as their AC units and just as efficient. They’ve given their marketing team full control over the product journey, personalizing flows by channel and simplifying decision points without bottlenecks. It’s a setup as smart and seamless as the systems they install.

Key standout elements:

• Tailored landing pages that tie directly to specific product journeys

• A thoughtful and intuitive product selection process

• The developer team can focus on revenue generation, conversion rate optimization, and better customer experiences

Best Content-Driven Ecommerce

Winner: Nom Nom

This award honors a storefront that drives measurable growth through smart content and SEO execution. 

Why we’re impressed: Nom Nom built a content experience that doesn’t just rank; it leads the pack. With articles loaded with expert advice, they’ve won the trust of search engines and pet parents alike.

Key standout elements:

• Crafted resources that are thoughtful, trustworthy, and drive brand loyalty

• Preserved SEO performance during a full content migration

• Made educational resources consistent and accessible across channels

We asked Sarah Zorn, Brand Copywriter for Nom Nom, how ButterCMS has helped their content experience. This is what she had to say:

“I am our brand copywriter, and not an engineer. ButterCMS makes it easy for me to manage content without needing to involve our product team for every update. The interface is intuitive, which allows me to really focus on writing and publishing high-quality articles for our readers.”

- Sarah Zorn, Brand Copywriter, Nom Nom 

Best Ecommerce Marketplace

Winner: SidelineSwap

This award honors a storefront that blends blog, landing page, or guide content seamlessly into the customer journey.

Why we’re impressed: SidelineSwap’s marketplace is a game-changer. It’s more than a store, it’s a trusted platform for community-first commerce, where secondhand gear stays in play, and parents keep their kids in the game without breaking the bank.

Key standout elements:

• Supports a massive product catalog with dynamic “model pages” that make it easy to list and shop
  

• Enables fast builds of high-impact content like “Best of” lists and gear comparisons
  

• A community-focused content playbook that keeps them ahead of the competition, season after season

Best Personalized Ecommerce Experience

Winner: 1-800 Contacts

This award honors the most complete, customer-centered, and high-performing site across all judging criteria.

Why we’re impressed: 1-800 Contacts is the clear winner when it comes to personalization. From custom promos to dynamic storefronts, every detail is laser-focused on the individual customer. And behind the scenes, their flexible setup helps their team test quickly and promote offers that are always the perfect fit.

Key standout elements:

• A beautifully executed, hyper-personalized customer experience

• A modular content system that makes A/B testing and campaign management easy to execute

• A clear vision for delivering smarter experiences and growing its market-leading business at scale

Common themes from winning teams

Here’s what we noticed: Every winning team had marketers and developers working side by side with tools that helped them move faster and smarter. They scaled across channels, brands, and teams without extra lift. And they created better customer experiences with way less effort.

Inspired? Let’s build your story.

Want to be the next winner? Start a free ButterCMS trial or book a demo (no sales pitch, just helpful information) and see how quickly you can launch your next winning experience.