Robinsons of Bawtry Migration from Aero Commerce to Shopify with ongoing CRO

Robinsons of Bawtry have been selling BOSS, Belstaff, Mulberry, Holland Cooper and Ralph Lauren from their boutique in Bawtry since 1986, with the kind of one-to-one service people drive out for, but the £50k they’d put into a custom Aero Commerce build bought them a store that barely sold anything.

The site was slow and customers struggled to buy from it. Almost every change needed custom development, so costs kept climbing with very little to show for them.

When Robinsons came to us they’d already been burned, and the last thing they needed was another agency making promises. We audited the Aero Commerce site and worked out what it would take to get it working, but Aero’s custom build model meant every fix and every future change would carry a heavy development bill. No amount of patching was going to change that.

So we recommended moving to Shopify, the fastest and most cost-effective route to a store that worked and could be improved without the costs spiralling. It also meant keeping their ePOS integration and bringing every customer and product record across.

The budget had already been stretched, so it needed doing quickly and doing right.

We kept it simple: clear product imagery, sensible collection and brand pages, easy navigation and a quick path to checkout. The biggest gains came from getting those basics right.

Three weeks after the new store launched, Robinsons had more orders than they could keep up with and had to push back their next meeting with us. Conversion went from 0.8% to 1.6% straight after launch, and with CRO on retainer since November 2023, conversion is now up 109%, visitors are up 298% and revenue is up 551%.