In early 2018, the European fashion brand Lion of Porches chose VTEX Commerce Cloud as its e-commerce platform and has since enjoyed increased conversion rates, and a 55% YoY growth in its e-commerce operations.
Highlights
- Customers are able to buy online in over 100 countries
- 140% increase in revenue in the first year with conversion rate peaks of over 12%
- 834% increase in organic search traffic volume
- Campaign traffic peaks of 20x over average traffic volumes
- High growth with minimal paid traffic investment (under 5% of revenue)
- Minimal maintenance and evolution costs
- 55% year-over-year growth rate after VTEX launch
- Achieved world-class ratio of 15% of revenue on e-commerce channel
A powerful brand
Lion of Porches is a prominent Portuguese fashion brand that reflects a new coolness through modern design and product development evoking British tradition and values. Urban oriented, the brand surprises with the creativity of its collections, exquisite attention to detail and the elegance and comfort it offers in each season.
The brand was launched in 2001, and in 2007 it was bought by Guimarães-based Cães de Pedra. Lion of Porches has been expanding steadily and is now physically present in 13 countries with over 80 locations.
Lion of Porches partners with VTEX
Lion of Porches previously worked with another e-commerce platform that made it difficult to evolve its website with the functionalities and performance that the brand needed. In 2017, they selected VTEX Commerce Cloud as their new platform.
“Lion of Porches’ e-commerce channel was launched in 2012. At the time, there were few national competitors with e-commerce channels but there were already many international players. The market quickly understood the advantages of online purchasing, and more importantly, discovered the opportunity to connect with our brand, vision and values through all channels.
Joel Vaz – Head of e-commerce and Digital Marketing
It was always our mission to demonstrate the exact same rigor, customer focus, prices, promotions, and a unified customer journey, regardless of whether the purchase was made online or offline. Our e-commerce channel became more and more important, not just from an economic point of view, but mostly due to the service we were able to provide our actual and potential customers.
In e-commerce, either you move quickly or become obsolete in a couple of years. That’s why we decided to work with VTEX. We went back to the drawing board and really thought through the implementation. We went through testing, interviewed customers, benchmarked our performance against digital commerce leaders, and developed an e-commerce solution that truly presented a pleasant shopping experience. At the same time the platform’s robust engine, flexibility and scalability give us the tools to promote our customer-centric philosophy.”
The Lion roars worldwide
Back in 2014, Lion of Porches started its global expansion in the neighboring country Spain. After launching VTEX Commerce Cloud in early 2018, they were able to reach customers in over 100 countries.
This capability gave Lion of Porches great insights about which countries to target next and provided a beachhead into new markets. Their strategy was both to establish an online store and to integrate into marketplaces, which gave the brand the foundation to determine where to deploy physical stores. Currently, Lion of Porches has retail stores in 13 countries.
E-commerce best practices improve organic search results
What sets VTEX Commerce Cloud apart from other platforms is that the VTEX team directly and actively participate in 100% of their customers’ implementations. Hearing about our customers’ needs and challenges, coupled with continuous learning of e-commerce best practices frame VTEX product development and solution engineering services.
One of the ways we helped Lion of Porches was providing a framework that was designed with SEO best practices and world-class site performance. As a result, the client saw an increase of 478% in its organic search traffic in the first three months after going live with VTEX Commerce Cloud.
This number is even more significant given that their last three months on the old platform coincided with the holiday season. The first year after implementation saw a whopping increase of over 834% YoY in organic search traffic.
SmartCheckout increased conversions
Getting the checkout process right is one of the most critical steps of an e-commerce project. All the investment in acquiring the customer will go to waste if the payment fails, or if there are too many steps to purchase.
VTEX’s patent-pending SmartCheckout is the first system to allow one-click purchases without a password. The platform’s PCI DSS certification assures the highest security standards for personal data protection and allows the system to store and process credit card information.
From the beginning, SmartCheckout was a key feature of interest to Lion of Porches in its goal to increase customer loyalty. Now, all its returning customers are able to complete purchases with only one click. Implementing SmartCheckout increased its revenues by 140% in the first year, with some campaign days reaching upwards of 12% in conversion rates.
SaaS architecture allows for minimal maintenance and evolution
Once launched, the new store was able to achieve best-in-class results with a maintenance contract of only fifty hours per month with their development agency, enough to support the creation of landing pages and marketing campaigns. This was made possible through VTEX Commerce Cloud’s multi-tenant SaaS architecture, which continuously pushes an average of 12,000 product updates per year for every single store on our platform.
When Lion of Porches moved onto a SaaS platform, they could finally explore campaign options without worrying about infrastructure limitations. Nowadays, the brand frequently executes campaigns that drive over 18 times the average daily traffic without any problems.
VTEX, the engine behind a brand’s growth
Many e-commerce businesses bet on huge investments in paid traffic to drive their digital presence. While at times this strategy can be successful, too often such companies come to a painful realization that overreliance on paid traffic can become unsustainable. This was not the case for Lion of Porches; instead, they prioritized customer experience in their online shop and their brand.
In fact, throughout the last few years Lion of Porches spent less than 5% of their online revenue in paid traffic. Despite this, they were able to grow 55% year-over-year in the first two years with VTEX. Their brand has surpassed the world-class benchmark of having 15% of the revenues coming from online channels.
Achieving stellar growth levels with relatively low paid traffic, maintenance and store evolution budget is the ultimate testament to how far a powerful brand can go if suited with a powerful technology engine.
“A business, regardless of its origin, internal or external environments and culture can go wrong in so many ways. An e-commerce store can suffer from the same volatility but in a digital location, which makes it even more challenging because it is not local and it’s not only inside four walls, it’s global!
Joel Vaz – Head of e-commerce and Digital Marketing
An online operation is about connecting multiple points, managing numerous different, essential and complementary areas. It is very reassuring, in the uncertain and ever-changing environment of e-commerce, to have hands-on partners like VTEX with such extensive experience in commerce digitalization and with a vast list of important clients.
Flexibility is another key factor with which VTEX directly improves our business – which is a factor I personally find critical and at the same time fascinating in e-commerce. VTEX continuously offers us a whole range of features and possibilities in order to develop better performance, achieve new customer experiences, optimize website experiences, and integrate into new channels which will provide us more traffic, more brand awareness and, ultimately, more sales.”
