case study of e commerce

What Is a Case Study?

When you’re performing research as part of your job or for a school assignment, you’ll probably come across case studies that help you to learn more about the topic at hand. But what is a case study and why are they helpful? Read on to learn all about case studies.

At face value, a case study is a deep dive into a topic. Case studies can be found in many fields, particularly across the social sciences and medicine. When you conduct a case study, you create a body of research based on an inquiry and related data from analysis of a group, individual or controlled research environment.

As a researcher, you can benefit from the analysis of case studies similar to inquiries you’re currently studying. Researchers often rely on case studies to answer questions that basic information and standard diagnostics cannot address.

Study a Pattern

One of the main objectives of a case study is to find a pattern that answers whatever the initial inquiry seeks to find. This might be a question about why college students are prone to certain eating habits or what mental health problems afflict house fire survivors. The researcher then collects data, either through observation or data research, and starts connecting the dots to find underlying behaviors or impacts of the sample group’s behavior.

Gather Evidence

During the study period, the researcher gathers evidence to back the observed patterns and future claims that’ll be derived from the data. Since case studies are usually presented in the professional environment, it’s not enough to simply have a theory and observational notes to back up a claim. Instead, the researcher must provide evidence to support the body of study and the resulting conclusions.

Present Findings

As the study progresses, the researcher develops a solid case to present to peers or a governing body. Case study presentation is important because it legitimizes the body of research and opens the findings to a broader analysis that may end up drawing a conclusion that’s more true to the data than what one or two researchers might establish. The presentation might be formal or casual, depending on the case study itself.

Draw Conclusions

Once the body of research is established, it’s time to draw conclusions from the case study. As with all social sciences studies, conclusions from one researcher shouldn’t necessarily be taken as gospel, but they’re helpful for advancing the body of knowledge in a given field. For that purpose, they’re an invaluable way of gathering new material and presenting ideas that others in the field can learn from and expand upon.

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14 Ecommerce Case Studies to Inspire You

We’ve spent hundreds of hours analyzing the world’s most successful DTC companies, including Sephora, Dollar Shave Club, Casper, Warby Parker, and Allbirds, to create ecommerce case studies you can use as inspiration for your own online store.

Today, we’ll share with you the 14 best ecommerce case studies that you can use to help drive more visitors to your website and convert more customers.

Let’s get right into it!

Shortcuts ✂️

• The Farmer’s Dog marketing strategy: 6 tactics that you can apply in your own business
• The secret behind the Care/of marketing strategy
• Dollar Shave Club marketing success
• How Casper took the mattress industry by storm and reached a $1.1 billion valuation
• How Glossier became a $1.2 billion company
• How Happy Box 10x-ed their online store revenue during Covid
• How Warby Parker reached a $3 billion valuation and became an ecommerce giant
• 4 steps for growing your brand organically using ColourPop’s marketing strategy
• Replicate Urban Outfitters’ marketing strategy with these 4 tips
• How Gymshark bulked up into a $1 billion+ brand
• How Allbirds went from a small startup to a billion-dollar sneaker brand in 4 years
• How Lunya achieved $25M revenue
• 6+1 tips from Rituals to create meaningful moments online
• 13 solid tips for mastering the art of personalization like Sephora

1. The Farmer’s Dog marketing strategy: 6 tactics that you can apply in your own business

The Farmer’s Dog was founded in 2014 by two dog lovers. 6 years later, they’re delivering millions of meals monthly. 

How did they do it?

We analyzed their sales funnel and boiled it down to 6 lessons you can apply in your own business to generate more sales.

Read the full The Farmer’s Dog case study .

2. The secret behind the Care/of marketing strategy

Every small ecommerce site owner dreams about a success story like Care/of’s. They achieved a $225 million valuation and were acquired by Bayer in just 6 years.

In this case study, we analyze the marketing strategies that Care/of used, including:

• Quiz funnel
• Content marketing
• Social media
• Paid advertising

Get inspired by these strategies to grow your own online sales. 

Read the full Care/of case study .

3. Dollar Shave Club marketing success

Dollar Shave Club is one of the most talked-about DTC brands, and with good reason. Their famous “our blades are f***ing great” video went viral in just a few days. The video went on to collect 4.75 million views in the first 3 months and has over 27 million views today.

This launch video gave them a killer head start, and their witty brand voice, strong content marketing campaigns, and direct-to-consumer business model enabled them to grow further. They were so successful that Unilever bought the company in a billion-dollar cash acquisition in 2016.

In this case study, we cover everything you need to know about Dollar Shave Club’s marketing game plan to build your own billion-dollar empire.

Read the full Dollar Shave Club case study .

4. How Casper took the mattress industry by storm and reached a $1.1 billion valuation

In this case study, you’ll get a sneak peek into how Casper was able to build unprecedented trust and convince people to purchase mattresses online.

We look at their well-rounded content marketing strategy, which covers topics of interest for visitors at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

We also discuss how they utilize social proof to build trust, their unbeatable guarantee, and their referral marketing strategies . Don’t miss this one!

Read the full Casper case study .

5. How Glossier became a $1.2 billion company

Glossier is one of our favorite ecommerce case studies. If you have a beauty brand, you’ll want to read it.

We’ve studied Glossier’s entire customer experience to find 5 lessons you can use for your own brand:

• Know your target audience and build relationships with them
• Use (micro-) influencer marketing
• Focus on branding
• Publish engaging content
• Provide an amazing user experience

Click the link below for all the juicy details.

Read the full Glossier case study .

6. How Happy Box 10x-ed their online store revenue during Covid

Happy Box is not as well-known as some of the other ecommerce stores on this list, but its growth is bound to inspire you. The company started as a side project and grew into a full-time ecommerce business during the Covid pandemic. In fact, they were able to achieve a 10x growth rate in 2021!

In this case study, we look at the marketing blueprint behind their astounding success.

Read the full Happy Box case study .

7. How Warby Parker reached a $3 billion valuation and became an ecommerce giant

The idea of buying eyeglasses online was uncharted territory for consumers a decade ago. But Warby Parker’s phenomenal marketing helped to overcome that challenge.

Their website crashed just after its official launch, their top 15 most popular styles sold out within 4 weeks, and they collected a waitlist of 20,000 customers during that time.

In this post, we share the key strategy Warby Parker used to reach its target audience so quickly and went on to become the $3-billion giant everyone knows.

Read the full Warby Parker case study .

8. 4 steps for growing your brand organically using ColourPop’s marketing strategy

In this case study, we share 4 key takeaways from ColourPop’s winning social media strategy:

• Give freebies in exchange for authentic reviews
• Build meaningful relationships with your influencers
• Get your hashtag trending
• Host Instagram giveaways

Check out the tips that you can easily copy for your own ecommerce company.

Read the full ColourPop case study .

9. Replicate Urban Outfitters’ marketing strategy with these 4 tips

Urban Outfitters is different from a lot of the ecommerce brands on this list because they didn’t start online and grow into a global retail giant… instead, they started as a brick-and-mortar business (back in 1970) and managed to make the successful transition to online sales.

It’s worth talking about them because they’re fantastic at keeping in touch with their target audience (Millennials and Gen Z). They also succeed in strengthening customer loyalty with a rewards program.

Check out this case study to learn how you can do the same with your business to drive sales.

Read the full Urban Outfitters case study .

10. How Gymshark bulked up into a $1 billion+ brand

Gymshark is well known for its influencer marketing strategy. In fact, the company was one of the early adopters of influencer marketing.

In this case study, we cover how Gymshark managed to build its fan base, and we spill the beans on what they’re still doing today to delight customers. Check out our 6 key takeaways below!

Read the full Gymshark case study .

11. How Allbirds went from a small startup to a billion-dollar sneaker brand in 4 years

Allbirds is among the most popular ecommerce businesses, especially among circles of professionals in Silicon Valley, including Google co-founder Larry Page. The company differentiates itself from competitors by focusing on three important principles: 

• Simple design
• Sustainable shoes, made from nature

Check out this case study to learn how they fight with their competitors, how they use PR campaigns and word-of-mouth marketing to get people talking about the brand, and more.

Read the full Allbirds case study .

12. How Lunya achieved $25M revenue

Lunya was able to disrupt the women’s sleepwear industry quickly by creating products that bridge the gap between style and sensibility. According to Lunya co-founder Ashley Merrill, the brand was able to grow by putting customers first and never losing sight of the customer’s perspective.

We analyzed the steps Lunya took to build their brand and create a successful customer-centric strategy.

Read the full Lunya case study .

13. 6+1 tips from Rituals to create meaningful moments online

Rituals, founded in 2000, has an impressive product line including skincare, body care, makeup, and scented candles.

They really care about their customers and focus on creating an engaging customer experience online. We wanted to find out how they do it, so in this case study, we explore 6+1 tips from the marketing masters at Rituals.

Read the full Rituals case study .

14. 13 solid tips for mastering the art of personalization like Sephora

Sephora is a cosmetic behemoth that we can all learn from. What’s the secret behind their worldwide success?

In this case study, we share 13 tips they use to delight customers and create loyalty, including:

• Driving sales through personalization
• Helping customers make informed purchasing decisions
• Using YouTube to drive conversions
• Nurturing long-term customer relationships

Read the full Sephora case study .

Final thoughts

Well, that’s it—these are the best ecommerce case studies we’ve found during our extensive research! Hopefully you’ve found plenty of inspiration on this list.

No matter how big (or small) your company is or what industry you’re in, you can use tips and strategies from these case studies in your own store.

Which case study is your favorite? Let us know in the comments below!

Nikolett Lorincz

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7 Best eCommerce Case Studies to Learn From in 2023

Table of contents

Whether you are new to the online shopping market or your shop is already selling thousands of products globally, it’s always essential to constantly learn from other successful eCommerce brands. These inspiring eCommerce case studies below help you gain valuable insights into how these brands turned web technology into a powerful weapon to get a huge advantage in the e-shopping competition.

1. Al-Bahar

Al-Bahar concerns

Al-Bahar is a Kuwait-based brand selling a wide selection of FMCG products, electronics, office equipment-related products from big brands like Unilever, GE, Al Alali and many more.

Being one of the most favoured and trusted companies in the Middle East, Al-Bahar received a huge number of visitors to their online website every day. However, the old Al-Bahar presence encountered several concerns that related to web speed, stability and infrastructure. There were major speed issues due to both insufficient hosting solution and a disappointing CMS, along with severe downtimes in terms of stability. More than that, as the old Al-Bahar website was based on Magento 1 which had come to its EOL, the store site was surely in need of significant improvements on both its frontend and backend. However, the migration on such a huge scale might pose some significant threats such as data corruption and other incompatibility issues, which left Al-Bahar with serious consideration.      

After consulting with SimiCart , a Google qualified PWA development agency, Al-Bahar has agreed with SimiCart solution to transform the old company website. SimiCart offered a clear action plan to rebuild the Al-Bahar front-end into a headless Magento PWA using Magento PWA Studio and migrate the existing Magento 1 backend to Magento 2. All the data from their old Magento 1 was transferred to Magento 2, while the store could benefit considerably from a headless PWA storefront, such as better speed, more flexibility, improved scalability, and a seamless shopping experience for the customers.

After the transformation, Al-Bahar’s frontend became app-like and engaging, and page load was no longer an issue thanks to PWA’s enhanced caching machines. The store received a higher purchase conversion rate on mobile, and a drastically reduced mobile cart abandonment rate as well. 

HP Concerns

HP is one of the pioneers in computers, workstations, and printers manufacturing. When HP expected to expand their market to the Asia-Pacific region with 5 new online stores, they came to a realization that the new online platform must support multiple HP stores on a global scale. In order to win the heart of potential customers, from individual shoppers to small businesses in new regions, HP Asia needed to deliver localized experiences across multiple geographies. However, this mission might be quite challenging when they’re a huge, multinational technology company. More than that, HP team also wished for controlling omnichannel , project management and customer relationship management (CRM) in one place, which required a comprehensive online platform to support.

Magento Commerce became HP Asia-Pacific’s first choice to deliver the true taste of local experience that could attract potential customers from different backgrounds. Thanks to Magento Commerce, HP was able to create several new online stores across different regions and countries that are equipped with an exclusive set of content management, payments processing, and language translation functionality.  

HP has utilized Magento Commerce to expand their online business to 5 different countries. 23% of customers decided to make a purchase online rather than going to in-person stores, and an excellent user experience is recorded both from online shoppers and HP Asia-Pacific employees. 

3. DeBra’s

DeBra’s Concerns

DeBra’s is an Australia-based company selling women’s undergarments, lingerie and swimwear since 2000. Over the past 21 years, DeBra’s has experienced significant growth in both online and offline channels. However, thanks to the development of modern technologies, DeBra’s online business had surpassed their expectations, which required DeBra’s to find a new online platform that could facilitate further growth in the future. They wanted to ensure their online presence could deliver a digital experience equivalent to an in-store fitting, especially amid the Covid-19 outbreak when the demand for women shopping online was rapidly increasing.

DeBra’s team believed BigCommerce would be the best option for their business, logistics and marketing requirements. With BigCommerce’s open API functionality, DeBra’s website could easily integrate with other technologies, such as a POS system , to help advance its marketing and customer experience. BigCommerce also supported DeBra’s to introduce a virtual fitting service, in which their in-store staff work as virtual assistants to help customers experience a professional digital fitting. 

With the new eCommerce solution, DeBra’s saw a significant 215% increase in revenue, 234% increase in site visits and 627% increase in customers.

4. elph ceramics

elph ceramics Concerns

elph ceramics is a sister-led brand creating and selling contemporary ceramics in Paddington, Sydney. Since their business grew, the inventory management process became quite troublesome, especially when they sold products on both elph ceramics’ physical and online stores. Their old POS system didn’t update automatically when sales, returns or exchanges were processed. 

elph ceramics chose Shopify as their online selling platform, and at the same time utilized Shopify POS to run their brick-and-mortar stores. By unifying their sales channels from one back office, they were able to manage inventory and update product information across sales channels with ease. Since all data is centralized, potential customers could also see accurate inventory quantities when they shop online. Also, capturing customer data became less stressful as this could be done in just a few clicks during checkout.

Since choosing Shopify POS, elph ceramics has lifted the retention rate to nearly 30% and significantly grown their customer database. 

Burrow concerns

Burrow is a B2C store selling furniture founded in 2017 with the idea of eliminating the hassles of traditional furniture shopping. Since their business reached $3 million in sales, they constantly run into system issues with the existing online platform due to the fact that their business growth has outgrown their eCommerce solution. More than that, Burrow team’s also in need of effective sets of content management tools that help them update landing pages without much technical expertise . 

Burrow decided to separate their website frontend and backend using headless commerce . Being headless gave them the flexibility to craft a unique shopping experience. Burrow team was free to utilize the available templates as well as customize marketing-focused content as wished thanks to a headless CMS. They could constantly update and adjust content across channels to make it appropriate with targeted customers. In addition, Burrow found it essential to offer customers special logistical aspects, including the ability to delay orders and have signatures on delivery. 

Only 2 months after implementing a headless solution to their website, Burrow achieved a 50% increase in site speed and performance and a 30% increase in conversion rate. 

6. Rakuten 24

Rakuten 24 concerns

Rakuten 24 is an online store by Rakuten, the leading e-commerce company from Japan. This Japanese online store delivers a wide range of daily products such as groceries, medicine, healthcare items and more. Having been soon aware that mobile commerce is growing faster than ever, Rakuten 24 put building an excellent mobile experience for users on their top priority. However, as Rakuten 24 is relatively new to Japanese shoppers, it might not be efficient to invest a huge amount of time and money in developing a platform-specific app for iOS and Android. Therefore, they believed that Rakuten 24 mobile web would work as an alternative method, as long as they can make an installable and responsive mobile web with all unique design and functionality. 

In order to gain market share and improve user retention, Rakuten 24 decided to build a Progressive Web App to deliver a smooth web experience across all browsers. Their PWA did an excellent job in combining the best of native app features and the broad reach of the mobile web. Rakuten 24 also provided a detailed guide on how to install the PWA manually on both Android and iOS devices for their mobile web users.

With the new PWA technology, Rakuten 24 reported an impressive 450% increase in visitor retention rate compared to the previous mobile web, a 150% increase in sales per customer and a 200% increase in conversion rate over a 1-month timeframe.

7. Mainline Menswear

Mainline concerns

Mainline is an online clothing retailer that distributes many designer brands in fashion. As Mainline Menswear offers market presence in over 100 countries via seven custom-built websites and an app, it’s of increasing importance to continually deliver an excellent web browsing experience. Their main goal was to complement their current mobile website with native app features that focused on mobile-friendly design and functionality.

Mainline Menswear made a strategic decision to build and launch Progressive Web Apps to provide a smooth and seamless customer experience on the web, as well as ensure the best performance. They believed transforming the original version of the Mainline Menswear website to a PWA would enable them to take advantage of the fast-moving web technology, and ensure the website framework (Nuxt.js, utilizing Vue.js) would be future-proof. 

With the new PWA technology, the Mainline Menswear website enjoyed a 55% higher conversion rate, and a 243% higher revenue per session in PWA compared to the old web. 

I love Taylor Swift and watching Netflix.

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Top 40+ eCommerce Case Studies.

How hismile dominated millennials, the most wanted persona on the planet.

by King Kong

Aggressive testing using social media to find and confirm the right customer persona.

Worked with key influencers from micro to macro to penetrate their ideal customer persona

One of the best eCommerce case studies I've ever read!

$20 Million Skin care business in 2 years with no beauty experience

by Daily Mail

Launched with 100s of nano/micro influencers in one go. Took over instagram with models posting photos

Strong distribution network of influencers with a warm + very engaged audience

Picked up on trends - then amplify via influencers

Just one single instagram giveaway resulted in 41k emails + 37k new followers

by Vyper.ai

With less than $1000 to run this campaign, Coconut Bowls generated LOTS of new emails + followers.

This case study breaks down the exact steps that Coconut Bowls used to explode this giveaway that resulted in $$$

One of the best giveaway case studies I've ever read!

The growth story of Zara | how they turned into the iconic brand of today

by Contact Pigeon

We love this case study due to the story of where Zara originated from into the powerhouse brand of today

Highlights the key drives of growth that helped Zara turn into a Mulit-Million dollar brand

Really impressive stats!

Bootstrapping one of Australia’s most popular shopping brands to $80M ARR

by Business Insider

Growth hacked through community building in early days of facebook, creating modelling competition getting friends to tag each other

A very strong personal brand on instagram and brand partnership deals with macro influencers on instagram

Obsessive focus on customers and customer support.

The journey of 20k to $12M in one year | How Instagram exploded this Business' Growth

by Smart Company

Laser focus on customer persona allowed to double down on Instagram influencers, where they shipped the product to many influencers across the globe

Find and solve a pain point people are facing, the cost should be dwarfed by the value

“Sweet spot” between 200,000 &500,000 for influencers.

AutoCreate personalised outreach messages that get 80% open rates using AI

Build a $200m arr mattress company in 5 years.

Rapid testing between copy and video creatives to ensure their target audience is always entertained and the ads can drive conversation

Video marketing and entertaining story telling helped with product awareness and growth

Bringing tech & science to a very boring/old industry

$0 to $13M in 12 months - Amazing Case Study on Koala

by Web Profits

Koala offered an excellent product that adds significant value, and topped with off with next-to-none customer experience with their 4 hour delivery

Every content piece should have scroll stoppers and be very entertaining - the shock factor video pieces

One of the best case study breakdowns you will read!

$300M+ Valued company in 7 years | Top Case Study

by Beeketing

Amongst the first companies in the world to use influencer marketing truly at scale

Build long lasting relationships by being omnipresent on every social media channel where your customer is

Popup stores across the world a big success.

$0 to $72M in funding | Innovation in Eating or Ingenious Marketing?

by jconnelly.com

A strong story always sells, customers want to understand why this product was built + build a relationship

Packaging is everything, after they repackaged and branded their product the brand took off

Strong PR game, especially in food PR is everything

$163,633.50 Sales In 30 Days | Blendjet using AppSumo for growth

Disclaimer - more around Appsumo product as a case study for them but very interesting study + screenshots.

That revenue figure was from 3406 abandoned carts in 30 days. Incredible recovery!

3 Steps strategy section = powerful.

$0 to $100M within 2 years | amazing Case Study on Allbirds

by Gallantway

A very strong email marketing campaign for cold outreach as well as a brand consistent email strategy for onboarding

Sell the vision and the guarantee, cruelty feel materials, 30 day return and 1 click ease to shop collection

Leveraged their reviews in all their marketing messaging.

5 years to $700 Valuation | The rapid growth of Away

Take something boring, fix the boring problems and create a brand of fun and excitement around it

Their brand is around the obsession of travel not luggage, Aways marketing maven came in their branding, selling people the outcome of travel

Build something unique and identifiable

Viral Video to $1Billion Acquisition | The story of Dollar Shave Club

Customer centric brand that created relatability with their customers using humour

A beautiful and wholesome customer experience with branded boxing, custom unboxing and several personalised up-sell opportunities

Their entire website + UXis a pure sales funnel

The $600M Story in 4 years | A brand case study masterpiece

by Reign 23

Initial growth with door to door sales, theres no bad sales call - spoke to every customer under the sun

Branded partnerships with influencers on instagram to skyrocket their growth

Found many of his original customers at CrossFit gyms

Kickstarter to $300M Exit in 5 years | Growth Story of MVMT

by Alex Fedotoff

Crowd funded a real world problem people face with access to luxury products at reasonable prices

Leveraged small to medium influencers to create a “mvmt” online similar to how Daniel Wellington built their brand up

Used data and leveraged media that works for them - Pics!

Self Funding and disrupting a stagnant market | Story of snow

Influencer marketing with the right influencers matching your target audience

Customer case studies and proof of work will be the biggest upsell

Multiple upselling systems setup during product checkout flows

The story of spanx through using humour | PDF download

by Stanford

This article illustrates how humour played a big role in the launch of Spanx into the brand it is today

By using humour she managed to build a loyal and committed customer base and community

A quality case study which is different to others

How FasionNova has become one of the most searched fashion brands on google

Achieved amazing early traction success back in 2013 when they launched and sold out over a weekend

Relied heavily on working with influencers and growing their Instagram account which boasts over 18+ million

One of the best interviews-based case studies I've read

Rebranding a very personal topic into a Multi-million business

by Fast Company

The medicines aren’t novel but the marketing is made to feel relatable, at home and comforting

Educational content around how men should take care of themselves, showing tutorials and ways for self care

Building subtle humour into sensitive topics = success

$0 to $750M in 4 years | the journey of Casper serving 1 million customers

by Sleeknote

Transformed something as mundane as unboxing their product into a memorable, share-worthy experience

Curiosity reward gap, referral coefficient is high, each customer was a sales person

Such a good case study! One of the best I've read

One tactic YouFoodz used to skyrocket growth by 3000%

by Referral Candy

A big focus on churn and reactivating existing customers a big factor for huge growth

Additional focus on social proof with reviews + social media big levers for growth over time

Whilst more SaaS based, use many ecommerce tactics

$0 to $20 million by selling leftover coffee | amazing story or Frank Body

by Viral Loops

Big focus on growing Instagram organically and started Instagram marketing at the right time

Influencers actively using the product in photos = big social proof and created a referral engine

Beautiful UX of their product pages for CRO

From a $30 investment into $100K per month | growth strategies by Beardbrand

A wonderful case study by Sleeknote which dives in 13 detailed strategies that contributed to Beardbrand's growth

Detailed and curated content specific to each stage of the funnel a big success - promote popular stuff via FB ads

Drip email course to nurture warm audiences

From $0 to $1.2 Billion ecommerce powerhouse in just 5 years

by Growth Marketing Pro

In the early stages of growth they focused on generating "buzz" through PR and word of mouth strategies

Building a social mission as part of their strategy made helped them stand out to consumers

A big focus on PR helped them stand out

$10K to $1Million in just one year | Case Study By Appsumo

Had a unique brand story and products which stood out from competitors

Invested heavily into an ambassador and affiliate program to spur growth

Content + Email game was strong

Thr growth journey of Supreme | Case study by Sumo

Majority of their traffic sources comes from organic and direct

Celebrity influencer marketing a big core to their success (like many other ecommerce successes)

Content + Email massive for their success

How Mellow perfected a pre-launch strategy to achieve over $200k in orders

Reached out to reporters to get PR (doing things that don't scale) and a focus helped them a lot

They studied the most successful websites doing products and focused on what worked for them

They used referral candy as a tool to build referrals

Growing a Multi-million brand by building a content and community machine

Fomo-based marketing and authenticity major factors for growth success

Quality content though socials and leveraging influencers across all platforms

Influencers are more exclusive to the brand

from a vintage shop on ebay to an ecommerce site with $100 million in sales

by Growth Hackers

An amazing story on the journey of NastyGal using an existing platform to build brand to then going on their own

Leveraged social networks and eBay to reach their audience

Fostered word of mouth strategies and customer loyalty

The growth journey of building the world's Top Hot sauce brand

In the early stages focused on pop-up stores to get face to face with customers but had scaling issues

Leveraged the Shopify Fufillment network program in order to scale

Another fantastic interview styled case study

Built their brand over 3 years to 50,000 unique visits per month

by A Better Lemonade Stand

Large focus on social media and chatting to existing customers and photographers to generate WOM

Leveraged Creative Market and their audience to generate sales and reviews of Filtergrade

Focus on building a community, not just an online shop

Reverse Engineering a $400 million startup | harry's growth case study

This case study outlines 5 key growth strategies that you can steal and implement

Replicable Word-of-mouth engine & White Hat links sections are very impressive

Sleeknote case studies are always very good!

From $1000 investment to $10+ million | the growth journey of Man Crates

Focus on storytelling and content big factors for initial growth and referrals

"Tease the unboxing experience to reduce cart abandonment" (strategy #3) - very clever!

Product Reviews helped convert more customers

$0 to $800 million | Growth journey of rent the runway

A large focus on data and obsession on being more efficient with the customer experience

Collecting data also meant they could create really personable experiences to convert more customers

Stayed on trend when it came to trying new experiences

7 strong growth case studies for ecommerce | Bellroy success

Taking notes of the strategy of their Black Friday approach is fantastic - lots to take away!

One of the best when it comes to comverting traffic into sales from Display ads

One of the best study breakdown of strategy

Growth Study of Bonobos | The rise of an ecommerce contender

Pride themselves on their customer service which helped spur their word of mouth

Andy Dunn says making sure Bonobos got one thing right, then the rest can follow

A nice overview of their growth

Overview of a successful content marketing engine in a competitive market

"Customers are also the website builders" - big focus on UGC (User Generated Content) = social proof

Leveraging of social media to skyrocket content amplification - big followings on FB, Pinterest & IG

One of the Pinterest accounts for ecommerce I've seen

From $0 to $100+ million in revenue | Growth Study

Everlane sniffed out potential channels for acquisition - not applicable now but they used Tumblr with great success

They did some clever guerilla marketing tactics - Type in "Everlane and Postmates". Quite clever!

Focused on nailing an effective affiliate marketing strategy

$87k with a single email which then helped spur continuous growth

by Rejoiner

Provide value rather than going for the hard sell on the first touchpoint - focused on 3 points on joining the community

Multiple CTA's to content & quality & engaging explanations of new products helped conversions

Learn from their email marketing approach = very good!

by Marketing Strategy

A quality case study that breaks down strategies across digital and offline - with a deep dive into metrics

Spent a lot of budget on Podcast and YouTube sponsorships and saw great success

Direct Mail also played a big role for acquisition

Review of the Iconic's online marketing strategy

This case study was done back in 2014 but still has some amazing growth marketing strategies & tactics

Goes into great detail about the website, product pages and overall UX with heatmaps, etc = really good detail!

Despite date written, one of the best case studies I've read

The Growth strategy of UK's ecommerce Juggernaut

Great case study which goes into detail the key factors for ASOS' growth success

ASOS automated their international expansion strategy. Amazing section to read and research more into.

Tailored, personalised content key driver for conversions

From $24 in her bank account to 16 millions followers for her businesses | Gretta Van Riel

by Single Grain

Influencer marketing and Instagram a wonderful combination for her success with her brands

Used messenger bots as part of her growth engine to engage customers differently than just purely email

Read more into Gretta - she's very impressive!

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8 E-Commerce Case Studies to Inspire You

By Busra Sahin

Table of Contents

Bosch Wins With Headless Commerce

Topdanmark embraces digital transformation, the vitamin shoppe boosts add-to-cart rate with smarter search, albertsons prioritizes personalization, hd supply increases search revenue, boohooman increases roi with personalized sms campaigns, my jewellery personalizes the customer experience with zero-party data, mall.cz's astounding personalized video campaign, achieve your victory with bloomreach.

In the highly competitive world of digital commerce, relevancy needs to be a top priority.

One day you’re in, and one day you’re out. Online businesses must constantly be aware of ways to keep their brand and products in front of the eyes of their customers.

That being said, we've pulled together the following eight real world e-commerce business case studies to help you get more customers and increase revenue.

Business challenge:

The Power Tools Division of the Bosch Group is the world market leader for power tools and power tool accessories.

As Amazon drives industry trends, it’s essential that B2B brands like Bosch don’t fall behind.

With Bosch Power Tools operating multiple global sites, the organization understood that its customers inherently expect the same tailored digital experience. This was the business unit’s main challenge — creating multiple unique experiences at the country level, while promoting and aligning holistic experiences globally.

Bosch Power Tools created an infrastructure and baseline of technology systems and processes for all corners of its organization to follow. It wasn’t about taking control — it was actually about helping to accelerate the organization regardless of the country or region.

This led Bosch to headless commerce and Bloomreach Content . Headless commerce differentiates from traditional commerce and CMS systems by untethering the backend and frontend from each other. Using a headless approach and leveraging Bloomreach Content enables Bosch to replace its frontend system without bringing operations to a halt, thereby maximizing efficiencies.

Bosch is now able to build features on a global scale to accelerate the organization’s initiatives while delivering a highly personalized experience country to country.

Bosch partners with Bloomreach and SAP . The Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud seamlessly integrates with SAP Commerce Cloud and is part of SAP’s Industry Cloud Program, available on the SAP Store. This powerful combination empowers customers like Bosch to build personalized, relevant experiences that convert on any channel and every journey.

Topdanmark is Denmark’s second largest insurance company, with the principle task of managing people’s insurance and pension schemes while instilling trust in its customers.

Topdanmark is forging ahead in digital with Bloomreach Content .

Topdanmark faced challenges that many FinServ companies run into, such as cumbersome legacy systems full of customer data and the need to create custom customer elements quickly. When deciding on a platform for their digital experience, Topdanmark was determined to find a solution that met three key criteria — continuous development of the product, an easier way to share content across multiple brands, and putting customer focus at the front and center of the online experience.

Topdanmark wanted a platform that was constantly innovating, with an active developer community, easy to integrate with other best-of-breed technologies, and set up for its own developers to continuously optimize the experience.

This meant that its shortlist was largely CMS platforms with an open architecture.

Flexibility was a driving factor for Topdanmark because it needed the freedom to prototype and test new customer features, including allowing customers to easily add-on coverage to their primary insurance. It saw a great conversion rate and the add-on feature was pushed into development to become permanent.

Topdanmark was looking for an experience platform that allowed this kind of rapid experimentation throughout the entire customer experience. Bloomreach Content fit the bill.

With Bloomreach Content , Topdanmark migrated 500 URLs in 13 two-week sprints and implemented a flexible content management system (CMS) designed to be effective now and in the future.

The Vitamin Shoppe® is a global specialty retailer and wellness lifestyle company with the mission of providing customers with the most trusted products, guidance, and services to support them on their journeys of lifelong wellness.

The Vitamin Shoppe saw its best revenue data in its search performance, with customers who searched for a specific, desired product on the website finding exactly what they needed. But there was room for growth in its category performance metrics. Customers who were not sure of the exact product they wanted often landed on the category page and browsed products to see which ones fit their specific needs.

For an in-store customer unsure of what they are looking for, a Health Enthusiast would provide assistance by learning more about the customer and recommending a relevant product. Prior to implementing Bloomreach, The Vitamin Shoppe did not have an intuitive digital platform it was confident could fill in for the Health Enthusiast.

To tackle this challenge, The Vitamin Shoppe implemented Bloomreach Search and Merchandising to optimize category pages that convert more site visitors who are learning and browsing for products.

With Bloomreach Discovery, The Vitamin Shoppe saw an 11% increase in add-to-cart rate on category pages and a 2% increase in revenue per visitor (RPV) for users who started their journey in category pages.

On search pages, The Vitamin Shoppe experienced a 7.73% increase in search add-to-cart rate, a 6.51% increase in search average order value (AOV), and a 5.69% increase in RPV — all within just two weeks of implementation.

These wins have led to increased revenue for The Vitamin Shoppe, and more happy customers on the path to achieving their wellness goals.

Albertsons aims to provide a consistent and distinctive omnichannel customer experience both in-store and through digital channels.

As one of the first grocery chains to start online delivery back in the 2000s, Albertsons has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to e-commerce. Its desire to provide connected commerce experiences to customers through personalized content to foster brand loyalty makes it one of the most innovative grocery brands on the market.

Since over 50% of e-commerce revenue stemmed from search, Albertsons needed to optimize the search results it was offering its loyal customers.

While in-store shopping often starts with preparing a list and knowing which aisle to go to for each item, the online shopping experience starts with search. The Semantic Search function of Bloomreach Discovery delivers accurate search results to help improve conversion by using natural language processing, advanced attribute extraction, and past visitor behavior to surface the most relevant products for visitors.

With Bloomreach Discovery, Albertsons could continuously leverage artificial intelligence to offer more accurate search results to customers and in turn offer a more personalized experience with its brand.

In addition to delighting customers with personalized search results, Albertsons could now offer product recommendations that were powered by Bloomreach algorithms.

This resulted in a massive impact for Albertsons as basket-building speed increased by over 25% after implementing Bloomreach Discovery. That clearly shows that customers were able to find the items they needed from Albertsons faster.

HD Supply is in the process of rethinking its entire digital strategy. Certain pesky pain points meant the multi-billion dollar company wasn’t innovating at a fast enough rate. It needed a solution that would allow it to serve its customers in the new digital world.

The HD Supply e-commerce team analyzed its channel available and how its customers interacted with them.

It realized that buyers wanted to be able to make a purchase quickly and reliably. HD Supply had to be able to facilitate its customers finding the right products fast and ensure that they could order them efficiently and go about their everyday business.

HD Supply set out to make its buying experience a more optimal one, specifically looking to improve its add-to-cart feature.

With the knowledge that using as much technology out-of-the-box as possible would avoid heavy customization further down the line, HD Supply settled on Bloomreach Discovery as its site search technology of choice.

Understanding that HD Supply customers want to complete purchases fast, HD Supply revamped its site search experience and added the ability to “add to cart” directly from the search bar.

Customers now see the product image, part number, price, and an option to add the product to their cart all directly in the search bar.

HD Supply desired to have technology to reduce some of the workload on its team. It now relies on the Bloomreach algorithm to drive the majority of search results.

With these changes in search, HD Supply experienced a 16% increase in revenue from search. This was the result of the Bloomreach algorithm at work.

The Boohoo Group PLC is an e-commerce group with a portfolio of 13 market-leading brands that use Bloomreach Engagement — including boohoo, PrettyLittleThing, Debenhams, and boohooMAN that bring fashion, shoes, accessories, beauty, and homeware to millions of customers across the globe.

While SMS marketing has proven to be a successful marketing tactic for many businesses, boohooMAN was experiencing some frustrations when it first began sending SMS campaigns to customers.

Using a previous SMS campaign solution, boohooMAN used SMS mostly as a one-off channel on big shopping days such as Black Friday. Its SMS campaigns sent non-personalized messages to unsegmented customers in the United Kingdom and Ireland to showcase big offers.

These communications were sent to largely inactive customers and the return on investment was subpar (never better than 2x on any given occasion), as boohooMAN’s former SMS solution did not have the same targeting capabilities as Bloomreach Engagement.

Bloomreach Engagement turned boohooMAN’s SMS campaigns challenge into a success worth celebrating.

Rather than using SMS campaigns as a one-off, boohooMAN incorporated SMS into its omnichannel strategy and is now sending personalized campaigns to segmented audiences. The company tapped into the wave of the future with these campaigns, using Bloomreach’s powerful customer data engine to craft SMS campaigns that meet customers where they are in the customer lifecycle.

Overall, boohooMAN has generated a 5x overall return on investment with SMS since adopting Bloomreach Engagement for these campaigns.

With its birthday campaign flow specifically targeting customers who aren’t opted in for email communications, boohooMAN has generated a 25x return on investment.

On Black Friday, the brand earned a 7x ROI after being more strategic about its messaging, personalization, and segmentation with customers located in the United Kingdom — a boost that shows just how impactful Bloomreach can be.

As consumers have become increasingly concerned about data protection, businesses everywhere are becoming cautious about data collection. This includes My Jewellery, a clothing and jewelry retailer based in The Netherlands.

My Jewellery wanted to optimize the customer experience it was giving its loyal customers while respecting their personal data privacy. The best way to do this? Embrace the zero-party data movement.

My Jewellery used Bloomreach Engagement to become an industry leader in the zero-party data collection game. It created an ingenious method for zero-party data collection that is both entertaining to its customer base and respectful to data privacy.

With “the style profile test”, My Jewellery has upgraded customer personalization, increased customer service, and curbed the need for risk taking in data collection. The style profile test is a game that optimizes the customer experience without invading privacy simply by letting customers decide whether or not they like an item that is being shown to them.

My Jewellery’s items are shown sequentially and customers make a decision on each item presented by simply clicking on the heart or X to signify their decision. After a decision is made, My Jewellery is able to offer customers a personal style profile filled with items that individual customers will like based on communicated preferences.

After a customer provides an email address, the results of the test are calculated and the customer is provided with a personalized style profile.

Statistics have shown the style profile test to be profitable. For emails that were personalized with style profile data, the open rate was around 20% higher than a typical email campaign. This shows the value of going the extra mile with the creativity in data collection methods.

MALL GROUP, a Bloomreach customer since 2018, is a leading e-commerce group in Central and Eastern Europe that distributed 9.4 million orders in 2019. MALL.CZ is one of its leading general e-shops in the Czech Republic.

MALL.CZ wanted to create a personalized video campaign to target computer gamers with a series of products online.

The second season of MALL.TV’s “Life is a Game” series was used as the basis for a humorous video that pushed key products to a key target audience.

But how could MALL.CZ distribute the personalized content to its customers effectively?

MALL.CZ’s personalized video campaign sent 20,000 personalized videos to a specific target audience with the help of Bloomreach Engagement, which played the part of technical enablement with the data flow. How? Webhooks and API.

Webhooks enable custom integrations with APIs outside of Bloomreach, allowing data to be sent to or brought in from a third party. Bloomreach API on the other hand allows the third party to send useful data to Bloomreach to be used for the benefit of your company.

Via webhook, Bloomreach sent data to the Motionlab video server to help create the personalized videos. Motionlab created the videos and sent them back to Bloomreach for distribution via a Bloomreach Engagement email campaign.

The results of the personalized video campaign were staggering.

The email containing the personalized video recorded a click-through-rate of more than 11 times the control database to which personalized video communication was not sent.

Users who were targeted by the video bought 701% more worth of products in the MALL.CZ shopping gallery compared to others who saw the same offer in a different manner.

The video campaign was not only successful monetarily as it also boosted brand awareness and positioned MALL.CZ’s brand image in a way that could not have been imagined prior to the campaign beginning.

If these stories inspired you, it's time to take action. Schedule a personalized demo today with Bloomreach to learn what the Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud can do for your business.

Found this useful? Subscribe to our newsletter or share it.

Busra Sahin

Digital Marketing Manager at Bloomreach

Busra is a Digital Marketing Manager specializing in web marketing, design, content marketing and SEO.

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19 Ecommerce Case Studies You Need To Steal From

You’ve heard it before - always be testing.

But if you’re running an eCommerce business then the tasks of analyzing your site data and identifying leaks in the funnel usually get pushed to the bottom of your to-do list. Let's face it, you’ve got 97 other things you SHOULD be doing today. 

So with that in mind, we've pulled together the following 19 real-world eCommerce lessons to help you cut straight to the chase in implementing some simple solutions to increase your online sales.

The ultimate growth marketing playbook

The exact 41 strategies we used to grow from 4-figure to 6-figure traffic in one year.

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In a hurry? Here are some eCommerce studies you need to steal from:

• How to improve Conversion: Envelopes.com achieve 40%
• How to improve Communication: Budapester increased mobile conversion by 29%
• Make small changes: Edible Arrangements increases same-day sales by 8%
• Make product benefits clear: Amerisleep increased checkouts by 13.9%
• Reduce website friction: Company Folders increase conversion by 68%
• Try cross selling products: Furniture retailer increased its AOV by 4.6% in 41 days
• Reduce clutter and distractions: Taloon.com ditched social buttons
• Use influencers to reach customers: Gwynnie Bee saw 5.85% CTR from Youtube influencer
• Reduce risk of purchase: Express Watches provides authenticity stamp
• Use events to drive sales: eCommerce companies saw a 27% spike during football world cup
• Remove distractions: Underwater Audio bump sales by 41%
• Get customers to take the next step: Kettlebell Kings’s takes advantage of user generated content to drive sales
• Use comparison data: Paperstone took out their competition with data
• Test and measure results: MVMT generated $90M in revenue in five years
• Find alternate channels: ECCO Shoes decreased customer acquisition costs by 14%
• Move past the product: Away generated $125M by standing out
• Drive inbound through content marketing: Bavarian Clockworks reached $1m in sales
• Build loyal engaged followers: Frank Body hit $20M in annual sales
• Be relevant to your customers: Society Socks improved survey response rate by 200%

Save this guide:  19 eCommerce case studies 

Learn from these 19 eCommerce case studies to see what problems they identified and how they implemented simple solutions to increase sales.

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[eCommerce case study #1] How to improve Conversion: Envelopes.com achieve 40%

A common eCommerce problem is prospects exiting the page before completing their order. As consumers, we've all done it before. So the team at Envelopes.com wanted to see if they could “rekindle the flame” and land some sales from hot leads using target followups. These are visitors who created an account and put an item in their shopping cart, so we can see some real intent to purchase at some stage down the track.

The Envelopes.com team were confident that sending targeted follow-up emails generally resulted in sales but weren’t sure of the best timeframe to send them. So they tested out email sends at two alternate time lapses post cart abandonment; the first group sent the following morning at 11 a.m. and the second group 48 hours post cart abandonment.

The emails sent at 11 a.m. the following day delivered:

• an open rate of 38.63%
• a click-through rate of 19.54% and
• a conversion rate to a sale of 27.66%

The emails sent after 48 hours delivered:

• an open rate of 38.01%
• a click-through rate of 24.71% and
• a conversion rate of 40.00%

Although sending these emails on the following day post cart abandonment had a slightly higher open rate, the most important figure, conversion to sale was significantly lower. 

Take home message

Send a follow-up email to people who abandon their carts, if you’re not already doing it. Though Envelopes.com found that 48hrs later was the best performing time, a different cadence and time lag may work better with your customer base, so test out multiple alternatives. If you're looking for some assistance on the creative messaging front, we have included the exact email creative used by Envelopes.com here:

(Envelopes.com Reminder Email 1)

(Envelopes.com Reminder Email 2)

(Envelopes.com Reminder Email 3)

[eCommerce case study #2] How to improve Communication: Budapester increased mobile conversion by 29%

As anyone in the eCommerce realm can attest to, it can be pretty disheartening when a major influx in traffic doesn’t lead to an equally major spike in sales.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened to German luxury fashion retailer Budapester a few years back.

Astoundingly, the brand’s website had been seeing hundreds of thousands of visitors each month—but its conversion rates were absolutely abysmal. The problem was even worse on mobile, where Budapester’s conversion rate was less than half that of its desktop alternative.

Upon realizing something needed to be done, the company’s first order of business was to communicate its unique selling propositions and other offers and policies more clearly to its visitors. This meant displaying information regarding free delivery, shipping options , and product availability prominently within its individual product pages:

(Budapester website | Source )

Along with this, Budapester also tweaked its site’s header—specifically, decreasing the logo’s size, and adding the above-mentioned info at the very top of the page. Again, this made it much easier for visitors to learn about these policies and offers right away.

Finally, the team also tweaked the appearance of its shopping cart page. From this...

( Source | Budapester shopping cart – Before)

( Source | Budapester shopping cart - After)

Once more, the above information is now prominently displayed to the consumer—this time in two ways. In addition to the change to the header, the website now displays the company’s offer for free shipping in a green font that stands out at the bottom of the screen.

The end result of Budapester’s efforts, as Growcode explains :

“Its overall conversion rate increased by 12.5%, with its mobile conversion rate going up by nearly 30%. All in all, this equated to an additional 120,000€.”

There are three main lessons to take away, here:

Firstly, it’s essential that you communicate your value to your potential customers in a clear and concise manner. If you offer something of value—say, free shipping on orders over $100—but you don’t tell your visitors about it...how are they supposed to know?

On the other side of this, you want to avoid including redundant or unnecessary information anywhere on your eCommerce website. Not only might this be distracting to your visitors, but it also takes up physical space on your site that could have been put to better use.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that optimizing your site might not mean you need to do a complete overhaul. As was the case with Budapester, a few tiny, seemingly insignificant tweaks can be all your site needs to start generating a massive amount of conversions.

[eCommerce case study#3] Make small changes: Edible Arrangements increases same-day sales by 8% 

Edible Arrangements had a fairly typical marketing challenge . They offer customers a same-day delivery option (and have done so for years) but people weren’t taking advantage of the offer because they didn’t know about it.

To educate customers about this option they significantly increased visibility with a large banner in an extremely prominent position on the homepage, just below the navigation bar. This created urgency around the offer by featuring a countdown timer to the deadline for same day delivery. It was impossible to miss or misunderstand.

(Edible Arrangements website)

The result of this simple countdown feature? An increase in same-day sales by 8% !

You don’t need a new product to promote something. People might not know about a product or service you already have in play, so by increasing visibility to your existing audience, you may be able to snap up some quick wins. As a side note on this particular example, creating some urgency is always a good sales strategy. Encourage your audience to act now, instead of later (or never). 

[eCommerce case study #4] Make product benefits clear: Amerisleep increased checkouts by 13.9%

Online mattress retailer Amerisleep had a problem that was quite similar to Budapester’s:

The company was seeing a ton of traffic on its website, but its conversion rates were nowhere near where the team would have liked them to be.

However, with the help of Growth Rock , Amerisleep decided to take a different approach to improving its website:

Rather than adding or deleting certain information, the team decided to focus on improving the messaging of the site’s copy—in a few ways.

First, the team dug deeper into the true benefits their products provide their customers. In Amerisleep’s case, this meant going beyond promising “a good night’s sleep,” and instead focusing on how getting a good night’s sleep every night can be absolutely life-changing.

(What would you do with more energy and less pain? | Source )

Secondly, the team aimed to reduce hesitation among its visitors by addressing the importance of immediate action. Rather than discussing the above benefits in a more hypothetical manner, the site’s copy was adjusted to address the idea that every night spent tossing and turning is another night visitors will never get back.

Lastly, the team tweaked some rather ambiguous copy comparing Amerisleep’s products to its competitors’ and made it more clear.

Originally, the website had made claims such as “No mattress is more carefully engineered.” The problem, here, is that this could be interpreted as “No mattress is more carefully engineered—but many are engineered equally as carefully as ours.”

The new copy read:

“Our innovative and proprietary materials let us build one of the most comfortable mattresses ever”

Much stronger, no?

Again, these relatively minor tweaks had major implications for Amerisleep: That 13.9% increase in conversion rate we mentioned equated to millions of dollars in added revenue over the course of the next year .

The overarching takeaway here is to write your copy with your audience in mind at all times.

This means:

• Ensuring they understand the true value your product will bring to their lives, and what it will enable them to do or accomplish
• Instilling a sense of urgency in your visitors, so they not only understand what they have to gain from using your product, but also what they have to lose by not using it
• Double- (triple-, and quadruple-) checking your copy to be absolutely certain it means what you want it to mean—and that your visitors will interpret it in the same way

[eCommerce case study #5] Reduce website friction: Company Folders increase conversion by 68%

Company Folders is an established business but had a website that their CEO admitted was “obviously last year”, which is putting it gently.

The main problem they wanted to remedy was their online quote function. This is a vital step in their marketing funnel, so making the process as smooth as possible was essential to  ultimately driving more sales for the business.

This sounds a simple task but with over 15 million product combinations, the current quoting system was highly complex. Further to this, there was a very high rate of prospects dropping out of the form partially completed.

Intuitively they assumed that getting the form onto a single page would help get prospects through the process, but after surveying their best customers, they realized that a redesign was necessary. 

They took a cumbersome single step process with lots of options and broke it up into a multi-step bite size process (pictured below). Doing this resulted in a whopping 67.68% increase in total quotes .

(Company folders website)

Take home message #3

Breaking down a complicated system into manageable smaller steps can help keep people focused and increase conversion . Though additional clicks can often be seen as new opportunities to lose customers, the Company Folders experience tells us that streamlining to shorter stepped forms is the way to go right now.

How to take your business Direct-to-Consumer: The ultimate guide

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[eCommerce case study #6] Try cross selling products: Furniture retailer increased its AOV by 4.6% in 41 days

(Note: For this study, the company did not wish to be named, so we will, of course, respect their privacy)

Perhaps the only thing better than getting potential customers to convert in the first place is getting them to add even more items to their cart before converting.

Our anonymous furniture company knows this—which is why they had been aiming to cross-sell a conditioning kit to customers purchasing leather furniture from their online store.

While sales of the company’s “main” products (i.e., furniture) were pretty decent, sales of these smaller complementary items weren’t all that great. The main problem was that most customers simply weren’t even aware the company offered the conditioning kit in the first place. Basically, the only way they would be exposed to the product is if they were to actively browse for it on the company’s website.

(We should also note that the price of the item being cross-sold costs only about 6% of the company’s average order value, while still adding a ton of value to the main product. In other words, making the additional purchase should have been a no-brainer.)

Knowing they needed to do a better job promoting such smaller-ticket items, the company decided to include a call-to-action directly within the shopping cart page when customers added an applicable big-ticket item to their cart.

So, the page went from looking like this:

(Your Shopping Cart | Source )

...to looking like this:

( Your Shopping Cart | Source )

Customers were then able to add the supplementary item to their cart with a single click (by clicking the plus sign), and could also visit the smaller item’s product page by clicking anywhere else within the pink bar.

The results were nothing short of amazing: As per Growth Rock’s data , the company’s average order value had increased by $55 (4.6%) in only 41 days . This equates to an additional $180,000 in monthly revenu e!

The first takeaway, here, is that successfully cross-selling relevant items that add value to your bigger-ticket items (and that add value to your customer experience ) can have a major impact on your overall revenues.

But simply offering such supplementary products isn’t enough on its own. You also need to promote these items specifically as supplementary to the more valuable and expensive items you offer.

(For example, it’s more likely that consumers visiting a furniture eCommerce site will purchase leather cleaner if they’re in the market for leather furniture. That being the case, you’d want to focus on promoting the product specifically to these individuals.)

Going along with this, you also need to present your cross-sell offer at just the right time to get your customers to bite. Here, the company did so as visitors showed a high probability of making a large purchase — a prime moment to add extra value to their overall experience with the brand.

[eCommerce case study #7] Reduce clutter and distractions: Taloon.com ditched social buttons

Taloon.com got caught up in the trend towards social proof, with "Like” and "Share“ icons on their product pages. However, they noticed unusually low conversions on pages with those social sharing buttons. 

To test what was going on they created two variants of the same page with and without the social share icons.

(Taloon.com website)

They assumed that by de-cluttering the page, it would keep customers focused on the task at hand - checking out.

The results?

“Pages without social share icons saw an improved “add to cart” click-through by 12% ”

Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it right. Always put yourself in the mindset of your customer, and keep them focused on the main task you want them to complete. Declutter pages with unnecessary actions to focus on making the sale.

[Ecommerce case study #8] Use influencers to reach customers: Gwynnie Bee saw 5.85% CTR from Youtube influencer

By now, you’re probably well aware of how effective influencer marketing can be in spreading brand awareness and social proof, and increasing engagement among your target audience members.

A few years ago, rental clothing e-retailer Gwynnie Bee realized this exact same thing. While the team had experienced a decent amount of success using a number of other marketing strategies (such as Facebook Ads), they knew they could be generating a lot more business than they were.

So, the company partnered with Reelio to get the ball rolling.

Working with Reelio, Gwynnie Bee began digging through YouTube’s massive database of influencers in search of those who aligned with the clothing company’s target market.

(Search results for "plus size" on Youtube)

The team’s first order of business was to create a list of potential candidates who fit the “surface-level” characteristics of their target market. This meant finding influencers who were female, aged 18 or older, and who typically wore clothing of sizes 10-32.

Now, here’s where Gwynnie Bee diverged from the “typical” path most brands take. Rather than looking specifically for individuals who often worked with other fashion companies, GB also considered those whose audience overlapped with their own. This meant looking at influencers who create content related to more tangential topics, such as lifestyle, accessories, food, and more.

The team then developed guidelines for their chosen influencers, which enabled them to create content that was authentic and non-scripted—but that also aligns with Gwynnie Bee’s overall marketing goals, as well. In addition to creating content to be presented on the influencer’s channel, GB’s influencers also created a virtual “closet” on the brand’s website to showcase the specific items they loved most.

The results of Gwynnie Bee’s influencer campaigns were...well...pretty darn good. While the average click-through rate of all influencer campaigns hovers around the 2% mark, GB’s campaigns saw a CTR of 5.85% — nearly three times the average .

If you’re just getting started with influencer marketing, the main thing to focus on is finding content creators with an engaged audience full of consumers who align in some way with your own target market. They don’t have to overlap entirely, but you, of course, want to be sure that the people who end up seeing your products will have a genuine appreciation for, and interest in, your brand.

As far as content creation goes , you’ll want to provide your influencer’s with almost completely free rein in order to ensure authenticity. This will communicate to your influencer’s audience the idea that the influencer actually uses your products, and aren’t simply promoting them because they’re getting paid for it.

Finally, you might also consider inviting your influencers to create content on your channels as well as their own platforms. Again, this will prove to their audience that they truly are superfans of your brand who actively engage with everything your company has to offer.

[eCommerce case study #9] Reduce risk of purchase: Express Watches provides authenticity stamp

This is a classic problem for online stores; Do you boast the lowest price or the most authentic products ?

The team at Express Watches were debating whether to communicate a ‘lowest price guarantee’ versus a stamp of authenticity on their website. They tested variants with both, each telling a different story about the clientele: bargain hunters vs aficionados. The results were pretty surprising.

(Lowest prices vs highest authenticity)

By labeling the site with a badge of authenticity, Express Watches saw an increase in online sales of 107% . A huge differential from the price based messaging, simply from a little seal of authenticity.

 You may think you know what your audience wants, but testing out some alternate value proposition could surprise you.

[eCommerce case study #10] Use events to drive sales: eCommerce companies saw a 27% spike during football world cup

The Soccer/Football World Cup is not only the most-watched sporting event on television of the 21 st century – it is the most-watched event of any kind, period.

Needless to say, such an enormous audience makes for some major opportunities for eCommerce companies all over the world.

Of course, it also made for heft competition for brands operating in niches like sporting goods, clothing, and memorabilia.

As SEMRush explains, the brands that came out on top were the ones who:

• Increased their presence on the right channels (specifically, social media),
• Adjusted their ad copy to target soccer fans from specific nations (e.g. whose teams were making a run for the World Cup)
• Developed relevant and valuable offers to address time-sensitivity (e.g. fast and free shipping to ensure orders were received before the Wolrd Cup had ended)

The opportunistic initiatives led to some MASSIVE revenues for eCommerce companies. In Brazil, eCommerce purchases spiked by $16.6 BILLION, or 27% above the average . After Germany ended up winning, German-based eCommerce activity increased by a whopping 75%!

First and foremost – and this goes any business, online or brick-and-mortar – you need to recognize an opportunity when it comes up and strike when the iron’s hot.

With this in mind, it’s worth noting that Brazillian-based eCommerce activity dropped by 17% immediately once the national team was eliminated from the tournament.

As far as recognizing these opportunities, you’ll want to keep an eye on upcoming events – be it a sports tournament, music festival, fashion show, etc. – that relate, in some way, to your brand’s offerings.

The goal is to “piggyback” off of the hype created by these events and market your products to those who are attending or engaged with the event in some way or another.

There are two main ways to go about this:

You might simply do as the brands mentioned above did, and ramp up your marketing initiatives throughout the timespan of the event, or, if possible, reach out to the host of the event to see if they’d be interested in partnering up in some way. This might mean sponsoring the event (in lieu of upping your ad spend) or even setting up a pop-up shop at the actual event

[eCommerce case study #11] Remove distractions: Underwater Audio bump sales by 41%

Underwater Audio had a problem with visitors who were in the middle of their sales funnel, researching specific products but then dropping off at the comparison page. When they noticed this leak they decided to get to the bottom of it. 

Here are the old and new versions of the page. At first glance, they don’t look too different, but the devil is in the detail.

(Underwater Audio website page comparison)

The original one was a bit more cluttered with the table formatting breaking up the flow of information. To test what the problem was, they redesigned the comparison page to make it simpler and more streamlined.

As their CEO said:

“The (rather) unattractive table had information in terse phrases organized in no particular fashion (activity, seal, size, features, warranty, depth). The paragraphs continued below the fold and essentially repeated the table, with only a few unique additions hidden in the text. In short, it was not the most engaging page!”

The new version did away with the data tables, streamlined the text, and put everything above the fold. 

The result? The redesigned page had an increase in online sales of 40.81% .

To quote Occam's Razor, “the simplest solution is often the best” and the simpler flow worked wonders for Underwater Audio. Find pages in your pipeline where users are dropping off and see how you can simplify them to focus your customers.

[eCommerce case study #12] Get customers to take the next step: Kettlebell Kings’s takes advantage of user generated content to drive sales

In yet another case of “x isn’t working as well as we thought, let’s try something else,” the owners of fitness equipment startup Kettlebell Kings switched to a more organic approach after realizing their Google Ads campaigns were costing the company way too much money.

The team’s main focus: Instagram.

Their initiative started simply enough, creating instructional content focused on teaching their audience how to get the most out of their workout sessions. 

As engagement began to soar, the team also noticed that its customers had also begun creating their own content featuring Kettlebell Kings’ products—which led the company to begin using this UGC to their advantage.

(#kettlebellkings on Instagram | Source )

In addition to the more audience-controlled content featured in the image above (that is, content featuring Kettlebell King’s products but not published directly on the brand’s Instagram page), the team also began re-posting certain UGC on their own page. As Gwynnie Bee did with its influencers, the Kettlebell Kings team developed a list of criteria such content should follow in order to be featured—but also allowed for some creative freedom on the customer’s part, as well.

While the content being created (by both the team and their customers) did lead to an increase in brand awareness and engagement , the team took things a step further by adding calls-to-action to many of their posts. For example, many posts that featured specific products were made shoppable, while others included an option to “swipe up” to learn more, download additional content, or sign up for the company’s mailing list.

(Ketttlebell's Instagram shoppable story | Source )

While the brand’s Instagram presence has directly led to “hundreds of thousands” of dollars in revenue, Buffer reports that Kettlebell King’s social media initiatives have played a major role in the company’s rise well into the 7-figure mark .

There are a few lessons to learn here:

Success on social media requires an intensely strategic approach to content creation and presentation. It’s all about presenting your products in a way that showcases their true value to your customers, and how your customers can get this value from your products in the first place.

While user-generated content is always appreciated, that doesn’t mean you need to feature every piece of UGC that comes your way. Again, you only want to showcase content that paints your product in the best light possible, and that provides value of some kind to your audience.

Finally, while using content to enhance engagement is great and all, your main goal should be to get your audience to take “the next step.” Whether it be signing up for your newsletter, reaching out to your company for more info, or going through with an initial purchase, make sure your content prompts your potential customers to engage further with your brand.  

The ultimate guide to growing & scaling an eCommerce business

Everything we've learned throughout our 18+ years journey in a 30,000-word PDF guide.

[eCommerce case study #13] Use comparison data: Paperstone took out their competition with data

Paperstone is a small paper company that competes with large brand big box stores like Staples and Viking. With most people defaulting to the brands they know best, Paperstone needed to find a way to leverage their strengths against the competition; lower prices. 

Rather than paying top dollar to compete for advertising attention, they simply included a comparison table on their homepage showing their pricing against that of their competitors.

(Paperstone website)

This simple table increased online sales by 10.67%! Just think about how much revenue that would mean for your business, without running any new promotion or campaign .

Assess your competition and identify your strengths. Then showcase these against your competitors’ weaknesses to make your business look like the obvious choice when compared.

[eCommerce case study #14]  Test and measure results: MVMT generated $90M in revenue in five years

As a brand new company looking to disrupt the rather saturated luxury watch market, MVMT certainly had its work cut out for them in terms of generating visibility and brand awareness.

So, the team turned to advertising via Facebook.

As far as creating content, MVMT’s approach was similar to Kettlebell Kings’: They worked within specifically-defined guidelines to ensure consistency, created a variety of content, and included clear CTAs within each post.

However, they didn’t simply begin creating brand new content for these ads. Rather, they took a look at the content that had already seen organic success, and routed ad spend directly to promoting these specific posts .

(Take a guess which one MVMT decided to promote...)

Though they had clearly figured out a way to ensure their ads would generate even more engagement (based on these previous engagement metrics), they also took things a step further by A/B testing various aspects of their ad content, from the images used to the copy of the ad.

While there are a number of lessons to take away from MVMT’s approach, here, the main thing to realize is that creating ads on any platform should never be a gamble.

MVMT could have easily created new ad content targeting its potential customers and simply hoped for the best. Instead, they used data they had already collected to inform their approach to creating Facebook Ads targeting specific audience segments. In turn, these ads were all but 

[eCommerce case study #15] Find alternate channels: ECCO Shoes decreased customer acquisition costs by 14%

While creating paid ads is more expensive than going the organic route, some paid options can end up being more (or less) costly than others.

Which is exactly why ECCO Shoes decided to partner with Digital Gearbox while switching from using text-based Google Ads to using image-based Google Shopping Ads. 

The first step of the process was to determine which specific products to focus their ad budget on, as well as which audience(s) to target. While the team would end up creating ad campaigns for all of the brand’s products, the initial focus was on getting top-sellers in front of the right potential customers.

The team then developed and optimized their product feed to ensure that any and all necessary information was included within their ads and product pages. This information includes product specs, product images, and any other additional info (such as shipping charges and return policies).

After the ad campaigns went live, the team then shifted into “experimental mode,” where they assessed the performance of each ad and ad campaign, making ongoing adjustments as necessary. In addition to continuous optimization of the product feed and ad content, this also meant adjusting bidding and targeting definitions, as well.

Overall, ECCO’s Google Shopping initiatives proved to be much more cost-effective than text-based ads, as the company’s cost of customer acquisition dropped by an amazing 14% . 

The main lesson here is that eCommerce companies with physical products should absolutely look into advertising via Google Shopping.

Google Shopping allows you to showcase much more information in one place than most other forms of advertising (especially text-based Google Ads). In addition to being able to include product specs and service-related info, the inclusion of product imagery alone is enough for Shopping ads to be considered more effective than their text-based relative.

[eCommerce case study #16] Move past the product: Away generated $125M by standing out

As we’ve discussed at length before , Away is the essentially the byproduct of co-founder Jen Rubio’s frustrating experience with an overly-expensive and not-so-durable piece of luggage.

While it would be easy enough for her and partner Steph Korey to simply develop a more sturdy and affordable alternative product to base their new company around, they realized this alone wouldn’t be enough to get their foot in the door in an already saturated market.

Instead, they positioned Away not as just a luggage company, but as a brand focused on all things travel. 

Essentially, their reasoning came down to the fact that luggage is more of a means to an end than an end in itself. 

As Rubio explains,

"Even before we were like 'let's choose luggage,' we were talking about editorial content and all we can do in the travel space. We see the long-term potential for Away to be much, much more than just selling luggage."

This outlook led to a number of content-related opportunities for the team at Away. Instead of creating content centered around luggage (which, let’s be serious, probably wouldn’t be all that engaging), they created blog posts, podcasts, and even a physical magazine focused on the lifestyle behind luggage and travel.

This enabled the company to stand out in a crowded market, and provide value to their target audience in a way no other luggage brand does. This, in turn, led to massive engagement—and absolutely massive growth for the company, as well.

The take home message here touches on the point we mentioned earlier when discussing Amerisleep’s shift in copywriting strategies:

It’s not about what your product is, so much as what it allows your customers to do, that makes them value your brand.

Rubio and Korey took this idea and ran with it, creating a variety of content to help their audience get more value out of their travel experiences across the board. For them, it’s more important to promote the lifestyle their product is a part of—not just promoting the product itself.

Do you want your target consumers to purchase your products? Of course. But, as Away proves, this can be done in a way so that your promotional materials actually provide value to your audience—and don’t come off as “salesy.”

[eCommerce case study #17] Drive inbound through content marketing: Bavarian Clockworks reached $1m in sales

If you read that headline and your jaw dropped, get ready for another shocker:

With the help of CanIRank’s services , the team at Bavarian Clockworks reached this mark as a brand new company with essentially zero initial following and a very limited marketing budget.

First things first, the team needed to create some high-quality, valuable content for its intended audience. While they, of course, focused on creating instructional and informational content on topics like clock care and repair, they also created content on more tangential topics such as German culture and European travel, as well.

Having a limited marketing budget, they then aimed to promote their content and brand via organic means, such as guest posting and giving interviews to be published on related sites. This enabled the brand to gain some much-needed visibility on established websites with an engaged and relevant following.

The final piece of the puzzle came in the form of technical, on-site SEO. This involved optimizing the organizational structure of the site’s content, creating interlinks between blog posts, and enhancing site loading time.

(Bavarian Clockworks progress graph)

The results speak for themselves: Bavarian Clockworks ended up hitting the 7-figure mark a mere three years from their humble beginnings .

Perhaps the main thing to take away from Bavarian Clockworks’ success story is that generating an enormous following via organic means is absolutely still possible.

While it’s not exactly easy to do so—and definitely won’t happen overnight—startups on a strict budget might want to consider focusing on building an organic following before diving into the world of paid advertising. Not only is it more cost-effective, but it also inherently allows you to build connections with more established brands that can help you grow well into the future.

That being the case, growing an audience via organic means isn’t an “if you build it, they will come” type deal. You’ll need to do a bit of legwork in order to gain traction.

As the team at Bavarian Clockworks did, this means:

• Creating interesting, engaging, and evergreen content that your target audience will find incredibly valuable
• Partnering with established companies and organizations to help promote your content to relevant audiences
• Providing your new audience with numerous opportunities to engage further with your brand

[eCommerce case study #18] Build loyal engaged followers: Frank Body hit $20M in annual sales 

We’ve talked about Frank Body’s meteoric rise to success before —and with good reason.

After all, the beauty industry is already saturated as it is. So it’s pretty crazy to think that a newcomer to the niche would be able to crack $20 million in annual revenue in less than four years.

While (as we mention in our full-length case study) the brand has done a number of things to make this happen, it’s worth pointing out that all of their efforts circle around one main premise:

Creating a community of individuals who feel free to let their guard down, have some fun, and just be themselves.

Even their influencers get in on the action:

(Aviva's Instagram promoting Frank Body)

Now, this might not sound like that big of a deal; a lot of companies are falling back on the “be yourself” motif nowadays. 

But, remember: Frank Body is a beauty retailer. In that industry, the message behind most brands’ marketing campaigns is “use our product to look like a Hollywood star instead of plain ol’ you.”

Frank Body is all about allowing their customers to look how they want to look—not how they think they’re “supposed” to look. 

It’s this fundamental position that has allowed the brand to grow a following of over 600,000 people, and to reach well into the seven-figure mark in a mere four years

The main message to take away from Frank Body’s strategy, here, is to truly understand who your target customers really are before you build your brand around them.

While this piece of advice isn’t exactly some carefully-guarded secret or anything, the reality is that most brands think they’re marketing to their target audience, when really, they’re marketing to a caricature of them . 

In many cases, this is because brands simply follow the same path others in their niche have before them. While there’s nothing wrong with doing so if it works for your brand, there are other times where you’d be better off bucking the trend and going your own way. 

For Frank Body, this meant building a brand around a community of people who use beauty products to show off their natural selves, not hide them. While there’s no way of knowing for sure, it’s rather safe to say the company probably wouldn’t have experienced the same amount of success had it gone the typical marketing route most beauty companies typically do.  

While this piece isn’t exactly some carefully-guarded secret or anything, the reality is that most brands think they’re marketing to their target audience, when really they’re marketing to a caricature of them . 

[eCommerce case study #19] Be relevant to your customers: Society Socks improved survey response rate by 200%

We’ve mentioned a few times now the importance of engaging with your audience to gather feedback and make improvements to your products and services.

But the fact is, there’s no guarantee your customers will take it upon themselves to provide this feedback in the first place. Even if you actively reach out to them, the odds of them not responding are still greater than the chances of them getting back to you.

Knowing this, the team at Society Socks worked to develop a collection of user-friendly surveys targeting consumers at various stages of the sales funnel and buyer’s journey. Their goal was to ensure that each recipient received a survey that was 100% relevant to their experiences with the brand, and also that each survey was incredibly easy to complete.

(Society Soda feedback)

As co-founder Filip Pejic explains:

"Our current campaigns are set up at various stages including Post-Purchase, Mid Subscription and at Cancellation. We’ve integrated the solution into our email system to send automated flows depending on our customers’ stage in the buying process. This allows us to gain a ton of feedback at every point in a customer’s journey and control the number of surveys they receive."

Society Socks also took a look at the more logistical aspects of survey delivery, such as delivery method and timing. This ensured that their audience would receive the surveys on the optimal channel (in this case, email) at a time in which they were most likely to respond.

The most obvious takeaway here, of course, is that you need to learn as much as you can about your customers’ expectations and experiences with your brand. 

As Feedier explains, this means defining or determining:

• Your various customer personas and segments
• The aspects of your products (and overall service) each persona values most
• The aspects each persona wishes could be improved

As we’ve said before, gleaning this information (and more) from your audience will allow you to make improvements to your products and services that actually matter to the people who keep your company in business.

Schedule a Free Demo Today! 

Here’s what you can expect:

• Walkthrough: An introduction to the Core dna platform. 
• Access to a free trial: Free trial access to the platform to test all the features.  

Hailing from Ireland, Paul is a fan of good food and coffee. For Core dna he’s responsible for Partnerships both with agencies and 3 rd  party integrators.  

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May 24, 2022 | 9 min read

7 E-Commerce Case Studies Every Marketer Can Learn From

Whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned marketer, there’s always something you can learn from top e-commerce brands.

That’s why we are huge fans of e-commerce case studies here at Drip.

Every time we write one of our e-commerce growth guides , it fascinates us how simple tweaks in design and copy can make a huge difference for those brands (and for yours, too.)

From getting top-of-funnel (ToFu) leads to bolstering customer loyalty, we’ve gathered seven of our favorite marketing strategies from our e-commerce growth guide series.

The best part is, you can apply these ideas to your online store, even if you don’t have a marketing team or a big advertising budget.

Let’s get started.

7 E-Commerce Case Studies You Need to See

1. increase conversions with compelling copy, 2. build powerful backlinks to your online store, 3. create content for each stage of your funnel, 4. recover abandoned carts with a twist, 5. make the most of your customer reviews, 6. create an irresistible unboxing experience, 7. turn one-time shoppers into repeat customers.

Good e-commerce brands don’t rely on attention-grabbing visuals or big advertising budgets—they go above and beyond to write compelling copy that convinces users at every stage of their sales funnel .

Only with well-crafted and persuasive copy, can they position themselves as the best option in the market.

To follow the path of leading brands, start with your value proposition and answer the problems you’re solving with your products. 

Then, repurpose your value proposition across different channels, such as your site, social media content, email marketing , and paid ads.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all recipe for crafting a good value proposition, there’s one proven copywriting formula you can try: Problem, Agitation, Solution (PAS).

It’s as simple as it sounds:

• You define a problem;
• Agitate the reader’s emotions;
• Offer a solution.

Take this example by Bellroy and how they use PAS in their value proposition:

Bellroy, first, introduces a common problem among their target audience: getting weighed down by baggage, bulk, stuff.

Then, they touch upon the results caused by this problem and agitate the reader’s responses: It can slow you down and narrow your view.

Finally, they relieve you by saying that it doesn’t need to be that way.

Because Bellroy’s products are the solution to your problems.

The PAS formula is easy to replicate for your brand, once you find the answers to the following questions:

• What are your buyer persona’s typical problems?
• How do these problems affect their lives?
• How do you solve them with your products?

With a similar approach, you can promise to free your prospects from pain .

See how Bellroy positions their products as a solution that’ll save you from lots of trouble in their ads:

When you click the ad, this is what you see:

Bellroy makes it easy for you to relate to the problems they solve. And they promise to free you from problems, pain, and panic.

Use the PAS formula to address prospects’ fears and pain points, and offer your products as the best solution for them.

Further Reading

• Bellroy Marketing: 7 Million-Dollar Growth Secrets of an E-Commerce Innovator (Case Study)

Even though most online stores rely on Google search for their organic traffic today, few e-commerce marketers know and appreciate the importance of e-commerce SEO .

And even fewer spend enough time and effort on link building.

Getting high authority sites to link to your online store will make your domain more powerful. And a powerful domain will help you outrank your competitors in search engine result pages (SERPs).

I’ll be honest—link building takes time and effort, but the results are worth it.

No matter if you’re selling men’s apparel, design furniture, children’s books, or personalized gifts—chances are, your e-commerce site specializes in something.

And there’s a greater chance that many publishers are already writing articles about the best products in your industry.

Here comes into play, what Sam calls, “The Best-Of Backlink Builder” strategy.

Simply put, you reach out to authority domains in your industry and ask to get featured in their “best-of” content.

MeUndies is a great example of this. You can see them on BuzzFeed under “21 Inexpensive Gifts For The Cool Guy In Your Life” …

… as well as on smaller sites, like The Pearl Source :

Getting backlinks from these “best-of” articles helps MeUndies rank for several competitive keywords, such as “boxer briefs”:

(Note the number of backlinks they have.)

MeUndies also sponsors several podcasts, both to get high-quality links and to expand their reach to new audiences.

That’s why they create dedicated landing pages for each podcast they sponsor and offer their listeners a special discount:

I don’t suggest reaching out to the biggest names in your industry and spend all your budget on sponsorships. However, this strategy is worth testing with small, niche-specific podcasts. You can also build strong links and expand your reach by sponsoring local events or awards.

• 9 Strategies MeUndies Used to Grow 1,583% in 3 Years (Case Study)

Whether you’re a novice in your field or a seasoned marketer, it’s likely you know about the effectiveness of content.

E-commerce content marketing can help you acquire new leads and convert them into customers.

But no piece of content will work the same for different people.

Users at different stages of your sales funnel have different questions, concerns, and needs. That’s why you need to align your content marketing with the buyer’s journey .

This doesn’t mean that you need to write 5,000-word blog posts for different segments each week. It simply means that you need to find the questions in your prospects’ minds and answer them with your content.

Take Beardbrand as an example. 

The company’s ToFu prospects most likely have questions about how to grow a beard. And when they Google that term, they’ll see Beardbrand after featured snippets:

Why does Beardbrand rank so well for that term? Well, beyond having a strong backlink profile, they have a highly-detailed guide about how to grow a beard:

Once you learn that you need to take better care of your beard, you slowly become interested in Beardbrand products.

This means you then become a middle-of-funnel (MoFu) prospect for the company.

At this stage, Beardbrand has content to educate you while subtly promoting their products. So if you’re wondering what the difference is between beard oil and beard balm, you’ll most likely end up on another one of their blog posts:

And in that blog post, you’ll see call-to-action (CTA) buttons to buy their products:

If blogging isn’t a part of your marketing strategy, try creating “how-to” videos to educate your target audience and subtly promote your products, just like Beardbrand does:

Visit Reddit or Quora to understand what your prospects are discussing, then create content to answer their questions. Implement product marketing into your content strategy, without being salesy.

• Beardbrand Marketing: How to Turn $30 into $100,000 MRR (Case Study)

Cart abandonment is every e-commerce marketer’s nightmare.

According to Baymard , the average cart abandonment rate for e-commerce is close to 70%. This means that most of your visitors will leave your site without buying the items in their basket.

While cart abandonment is inevitable, luckily there’s something you can do to minimize it.

With an optimized checkout and well-written abandoned cart emails , you can go beyond recovering the abandoned carts—and even sell more.

In the end, you’ll not only recover potential lost revenue but also increase the average order value (AOV).

Harry’s has a genius strategy to reclaim abandoned carts (with a twist.)

When you leave Harry’s’ site without starting your subscription, you receive an email that reminds you to complete the process.

At first, it looks like any other abandoned cart email:

In the first part of the email, Harry’s reminds you about the benefit of buying a subscription plan.

But in the second part, things get interesting.

Harry’s offers you a downsell, in case you’re not ready to commit to a subscription. 

But they don’t stop there.

When you follow the link and add the Truman Set to your cart, this time they upsell with a popup suggesting a mystery item.

This way, they take you back to a higher price point, even if you’re not ready for committing to a subscription plan.

If you want to upsell a customer with an exclusive mystery item (or any item for that matter), you can create an onsite campaign with our SiteData condition and display the popup to visitors who exceed a certain basket value.

• Harry’s Marketing: What We Learned from Reverse Engineering a $400 Million Startup (Case Study)

When it comes to customer testimonials , there are two main challenges waiting for e-commerce marketers:

• Collecting as many rich and insightful reviews as possible; and
• Using those reviews in the best way possible to convince your prospects to buy from you.

How you’re asking for testimonials can have a huge impact on both the quantity and the quality of the reviews you collect.

Even if you convince your customers to leave a product review, most of the times they’re too generic and broad.

Casper finds a clever solution to this common problem. A few days after you become a customer, the company sends you this email asking for a product review:

When you click the CTA button, you land on a page where you can submit the following form and leave a review:

Casper invites you to answer some specific questions rather than leaving it completely open-ended. This way, it becomes easier for their customers to fill the form.

Plus, they get richer and more meaningful product reviews, like this:

How you display your reviews is as important as collecting them.

You can repurpose your customer testimonials across several channels: Use them in your emails, product pages, paid ads, and many more.

Take inspiration from Casper again. They both display customer reviews on a dedicated page…

… and use it in their email marketing as social proof :

• Casper Marketing: How a Mattress Company Went from Zero to $750 Million in 4 Years (Case Study)

With the rise of user-generated content and electronic word-of-mouth, the phenomenon of unboxing made a quick entrance into our lives.

It’s not a coincidence that today a YouTube channel on unboxing has over 14 million subscribers.

Both consumers and marketers love unboxing videos. Because they help consumers get a detailed overview of the products they’re interested in. And they mean social proof and more reach for marketers. 

In order to create an irresistible unboxing experience for your customers, you need to set their expectations from the start.

Man Crates does that well by teasing the unboxing experience. When you enter your zip code on one of their product pages , the company gives you an estimated delivery date:

Plus, they give you more information about how your delivery will ship:

During checkout, they also let you write a gift note and enhance the gift recipient’s unboxing experience.

And even better, they suggest some fun pre-written notes to choose from:

Their crates don’t only come with a fun note …

… but also with a message that encourages you to record and share your unboxing experience.

If you want even more people to take action, you can offer your customers a special discount on their next order, in return for sharing their unboxing moments.

• Man Crates Marketing: How to Turn $1,000 into $10+ Million (Case Study)

Many e-commerce marketers focus too much on getting ToFu leads and converting them into new customers. While doing that, they fail to use the full potential of their existing customers.

In fact, repeat customers spend around 67% more than your new customers.

But without the right incentive, your customers will have little reason to return to your store.

With an attractive customer loyalty program , you can turn one-time purchases into repeat buyers and increase your revenue dramatically.

Knowing this well, Sunski has a unique customer loyalty program that rewards their customers for different actions they take.

Going beyond shopping points, they offer you many other ways to earn credit:

As part of their customer loyalty program, the company also uses referral marketing .

All you need to do is to write your friend’s email address and Sunski takes care of the rest for you.

Your friend receives the following email and you both get a nice $10 discount on Sunski products.

This way, you don’t only retain your existing customers, but also let them bring you more customers.

The best part is, you don’t need to create a loyalty program from scratch to use referrals. You can easily set up a Shopify app or use a third-party tool to start a referral program.

• How Two Surfers Turned a Pair of Vintage Sunglasses into a Two-Million Dollar Business (Case Study)

These were the key takeaways we had while writing e-commerce case studies on our blog.

No matter how many employees you have or what kind of products you’re selling, I’m sure you’ll find something valuable in them for your online store.

You can implement some of these strategies already today and test them out for yourself.

Seray Keskin

Seray is a Product Marketing Manager at Drip. When she’s not busy creating content for Drip, she can be found trying to crack the Danish language and watching Back to the Future for the hundredth time.

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SB Ecommerce

International sales: two stores, one stock

SB Ecommerce provides outsourced e-commerce services for its clients. The company builds online stores, manages the client's marketing and social media presence, and serves warehousing services.

A solution was needed quickly

SB Ecommerce has online stores in thirteen different countries. The products range from sports and fashion clothes, designer watches, arts and crafts to sports equipment.

They required not only to be able to sell from the same stock in two different online stores but with varying prices in each store. OGOship could provide the service for their needs.

Why OGOship?

Kim Kaarti says partnering with a 3PL service provider has worked well for their needs. For a company like SB Ecommerce, resourcing and staffing is a high priority issue, especially in high-demand seasons.

SB Ecommerce finds it essential that they can service all their clients well and make sure everything runs smoothly. With a 3PL partner, SB Ecommerce doesn't need to worry about recruiting or managing staff; this is all taken care of on their behalf.

Save labor costs and shipping expenses

Another big bonus Kim Kaarti sees in the collaboration is the ability to use OGOship's pre-arranged logistics deals. They can choose a particular delivery method for a specific country and overall have more variability in the delivery methods.

Without a 3PL partner, SB Ecommerce would have to negotiate all the deals themselves. But to be able to negotiate good contracts, you need high volume. As a sole operator, the odds of getting good prices would be low.

By outsourcing logistics to OGOship SB Ecommerce has been able to save both labor and shipping costs.

"It has been nice to notice how proactive OGOship's customer service is. They make sure to contact you if there is anything that needs my attention."

Kim Kaarti, SB Ecommerce

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• Case Artiks

International growth with OGOship. Artiks mission was to scale to the Nordic countries fast and cost-effectively. Artiks needed a partner to support business roll-out and growth.

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Outsourcing warehousing and logistics ensured that Mukama was able to start international shipments with competitive logistics contracts and quick and efficient order handling.

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Home » Building Online Stores » E-Commerce Examples | 5 Inspirational Case Studies for You

E-Commerce Examples | 5 Inspirational Case Studies for You

Our independent research projects and impartial reviews are funded in part by affiliate commissions, at no extra cost to our readers. Learn more

Trying to build a business is not easy and quite frankly, downright discouraging a lot of times during the early days.

If you have a full-time job, kids, extracurricular activities, or other “life” obligations, trying to squeeze out a few more hours a day or a week to build a business is pretty tough.

For us, what really helped brighten some days, or gave us a bit more energy to keep going, was to come across success stories from e-commerce examples.

It gave us hope that at least some people were achieving success and that we could as well if we kept at it. It showed us that people not that much different from us, can “make it”.

Furthermore, these e-commerce examples also gave us some helpful insights into what strategies, tactics or tools that they used to build their businesses. We find these interesting and educational, even till this day.

Aside from watching Shark Tank , here are a few other e-commerce examples will be of some inspiration to you as well.

We’ll also share with you one of our favorite source of learning from other successes businesses (and their failures) later in this post below.

1)  What to Sell Online – if you need some ideas on what to sell, see this detailed discussion

2) eCommerce Builder Comparison Chart – see side-by-side comparison between different online store builders

3) Best Ecommerce Platforms – to compare the best of the best on the market today

E-COMMERCE EXAMPLE #1: SELLING $170,000 WORTH OF HOT SAUCE IN 10 MONTHS

There you have it. You don’t have to invent another Facebook to become successful!

Casey and Morgan created their own hot sauce using raw honey and chili flakes, and sold $170,000 worth of it within 1 year .

This case study goes over some insightful tips, lessons, and tools that they use to power their e-commerce online store.

E-COMMERCE EXAMPLE #2: HOW THESE FULL-TIME PARENTS SELL DOLL CLOTHING PATTERNS AND EARN $50,000 PER MONTH IN SALES

This case study is particularly inspirational, as the couple that built this business are full-time parents.

It also shows you how you can create a very successful business, even in very narrow niches. In this case, they are selling doll clothing patterns ( really!! )

Jason and Cinnamon found a problem that needed solving, leveraged their skills, and sold digital products to their customers.

This is a great example of how digital products work, how they’re more leverageable than physical products, and what tools they used to sell digital download products.

E-COMMERCE EXAMPLE #3: HOW A FRESH JUICE COMPANY GREW SALES FROM $8,000 PER MONTH TO $96,000 PER MONTH

It’s not easy to sell any product, and to gain momentum to grow sales is just as challenging.

Jessica, the founder of Raw Generation, similar to all small businesses, went through a phase of figuring out how to generate sales .

She had to figure out how to position her juicing product, and what is the most effective way to generate more sales. She experimented with deal sites (such as Groupon , etc) and grew her business from there.

In this case study, Jessica also shares 5 important lessons she learned through her own experiences in building her business.

E-COMMERCE EXAMPLE #4: EX-CRIMINAL BUILT AN ONLINE BUSINESS THAT GENERATES $80,000 PER MONTH IN SALES

It really doesn’t matter what happened to you in the past. If put forth hard work, perseverance and continually learn, you can also succeed in building a business.

Robert Nava was in an out of correctional facilities from 11 years old to 27 years old. But that didn’t stop him in achieving success in selling outdoor gear .

He focused on building a dropshipping business  as he didn’t have any of his own products to sell, and gained traction through building a following through Facebook .

Free Guide to Dropshipping – see this guide to get good insights into how to build or improve your ecommerce dropshipping business

Succeeding in building an e-commerce business doesn’t always discriminate against your past. You can control your own future if you give yourself permission to do so.

E-COMMERCE EXAMPLE #5: HOW A BUSINESS BUILT A 7-FIGURE BUSINESS LEVERAGING OFF YOUTUBE

Most people believe that the only ways to market to potential buyers are through traditional advertisement channels, such as newspaper or magazine ads.

What this husband and wife team did, was tap into YouTube – one of the fastest and most popular channels – to sell hair extension products .

The way they did it was through providing great, valuable content to their audience by offering them free video tutorials on how to create glamorous hair style (inspired by celebrities) on your own.

This “free” way of marketing is extremely powerful and effective. Tutorials are an excellent way of building a brand, fan base, and eventually marketing helpful products for your audience to purchase to them accomplish their goals (in this case study, create beautiful hairstyles).

ONE RESOURCE TO FIND INSPIRATIONAL BUSINESS EXAMPLES & STORIES

When we first started building our businesses, we found an awesome website that interviewed successful entrepreneurs. What we appreciated about these interviews is that the so-called “overnight successes” happened over years of struggles and failures.

In addition to understanding strategies and tactics of how these big and small businesses used to grow their ventures, the interviews also went deep into the psychology of the entrepreneurs, and what they struggled with.

They’re just people after all, and we definitely related to their experiences and found that their stories gave us encouragement and strength to push through some of our struggling times.

The website is Mixergy.com and I’d highly encourage you to watch or listen to some of the interviews as you’ll most likely find them very helpful as well.

CONCLUSION – HOW E-COMMERCE EXAMPLES CAN HELP YOU FIND YOUR SUCCESS

At the end of the day, trying to build your own business is not an easy journey, but it can be a very rewarding one.

Going at it alone is tough, so reading up on case studies can help make your journey a bit easier.

These case studies can show you new and interesting strategies or tactics, and can also be therapeutic by seeing how others also struggled the way you are now struggling.

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