With conversion rates up nearly 80%, Incu boosted its annual sales 300% after replatforming

For nearly 20 years, Incu has brought the very latest in international fashion and lifestyle products through its 10 retail stores on Australia’s east coast. 

Incu has traditionally been very rooted in bricks and mortar shopping, yet while it always maintained an online presence the company realized it needed a more robust and scalable ecommerce solution to better reflect its brand, manage increasing stock and delivery complexity, and properly complement its retail experience. With Shopify Plus, Incu has been able to:

• Increase its online sales 300% year-over-year
• Raise conversion rates up to 80%
• Boost average session engagement 91%, while reducing bounce rate 40% 

Challenge

One of Incu’s core values is to introduce customers to new international brands, so it was important its online experience facilitated this same sense of discovery.

Originally, Incu was using its own ecommerce platform before it moved to a Basic Shopify plan. But as the business grew to offer more brands, it required more from its backend to power the growing complexity behind its operations—from improved fulfillment and inventory management to the ability to automate location-based differences in shipping rules and sizing systems.

“We pride ourselves on our curated brand mix and our products, but also on our customer service,” says Douglas Low, Incu’s CEO. “So we were looking for a platform that allowed us to deliver both to our customers, and deliver an on-brand experience. We really needed a platform that was going to allow us to automate manual features so we could focus on improving our customer experience.”

Solutions

Incu briefly considered other platforms, however it was happy with its Shopify experience overall. It decided the best solution would be to upgrade to Shopify Plus.

In particular, Incu was attracted to the platform’s automation tools such as Launchpad and Flow to manage its complex product range, and the Script Editor for cart and shipping price customizations. It also engaged Shopify Plus’ expert counsel to help navigate challenges in scaling and growing by focusing on the core drivers of its business growth.

In keeping with its brand, Incu wanted to do a lot of front-end customizations, and built a custom app to manage things like advanced filtering. This meant having access to higher API rate limits and the full range of endpoints, and meant Incu no longer required a developer to help run its online store.

Results

Incu’s upgrade to Shopify Plus was completed within hours.

In conjunction with a new theme with Shopify Plus features, Incu lifted conversion rate 15%, revenue 26%, average session engagement 91%, while bounce rate went down 40%—all in its first week since replatforming. In the following months, Incu’s conversion rate increased another 70%-80%.

Incu also felt comfortable enough within two weeks of implementing Shopify Plus to launch a sale promotion using Launchpad, which saw revenue jump 151%. Since this time, all reporting metrics have continued to increase, and revenue has grown 300%.

Incu is enjoying the scalability of its ecommerce platform while also using Shopify Scripts to control checkout to certain countries. Shopify has easily integrated with its mail platform, enterprise resource planning software, and its fulfillment systems. This has removed many of the manual processes Incu had been managing, and has also allowed the retailer to expand its omnichannel experience.