Clean Beauty Brand

The Challenge

The client is a clean-beauty brand running DTC on Shopify alongside specialty retail distribution. The brand had been built on ingredient quality, transparent sourcing, and earned editorial coverage, with a loyal customer base and consistent repeat-purchase behaviour. Annual revenue sat in the $3–5M range, with DTC traffic skewing heavily mobile.

By most measures the business was healthy. Email open rates were strong, retail orders were growing, new product launches sold through. But the DTC revenue curve had started to flatten, and the founder couldn't put a finger on why.

Site speed was fine — the brand had invested in their Shopify setup and the pages loaded quickly. The product pages were well-built: good photography, clear ingredient stories, visible reviews. Traffic was growing month on month. The problem wasn't attracting people, and it wasn't convincing them to want something. It was the last ten seconds of the buying process — the moment between "I want this" and "I've paid for this." That gap was haemorrhaging revenue and nobody had looked at it closely.

Six months of checkout funnel data made the picture stark. The brand was losing 41% of shoppers at the payment step — after they'd already added a product to their basket, entered their shipping address, and committed enough to reach the final screen. They were dropping off at the exact moment they should have been buying. Three things were causing it:

• Express checkout was buried. Shop Pay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay were available but sat below the fold on mobile, behind a "continue to payment" button that defaulted to manual card entry. Most mobile shoppers expect to pay in two taps. When they couldn't see that option immediately, a meaningful chunk decided it wasn't worth the effort.
• The form was asking for too much. Standard Shopify checkout with no customisation. Phone number was mandatory. Company name was visible. Neither is relevant for a DTC skincare customer buying a cleanser. Extra fields create friction; friction at checkout creates abandonment.
• There were no trust signals at the payment screen. The product imagery, the ingredient story, the reviews, the brand voice — all of it disappeared the moment a customer entered the checkout. What replaced it was a generic payment form with no reassurance that the transaction was safe, the returns were easy, or the brand they'd been researching was still present.

For a brand built on transparency and customer trust, the checkout experience was sending exactly the wrong signal at exactly the wrong moment.

The Approach

Three months. No change to the product catalogue, the pricing, or the marketing. The brief was to rebuild the checkout flow within Shopify's framework so the easy path became the default — and to keep the brand present right through to the receipt.

Express checkout pulled above the fold

Shop Pay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay moved to the top of the payment screen — visible immediately on mobile with no scroll required. The default path became the two-tap path. Manual card entry stayed available for shoppers who preferred it, but it was no longer the first thing the eye landed on.

Form stripped to essentials

The standard Shopify checkout was customised down to the fields that actually mattered for a DTC skincare order. Phone number became optional, the company name field was removed, and a couple of other low-value fields were trimmed. The checkout went from eight required fields to five — a small change in pixel terms, a meaningful change in completion rate.

Persistent trust bar across the checkout

A persistent trust bar was added to the bottom of every checkout screen: free returns within 30 days, secure payment icons, and a one-line brand statement reinforcing the ingredient and quality story buyers had come to the site for. Small additions, but they kept the brand visibly present throughout the transaction and closed the moment where a shopper might second-guess themselves.

The Outcome

Within 90 days of the rebuilt checkout going live:

• Checkout completion rate up 31% — the same number of people starting checkout were now finishing it.
• Mobile revenue up 22%, purely from recovering shoppers who had already decided to buy.
• Average order value up 8% — Shop Pay's one-tap experience made it easier to check out with a full basket rather than trimming down to reduce form-filling effort.
• Return purchase rate held steady — no cannibalisation of repeat behaviour, which had been a concern going in.

The revenue recovery came entirely from people who had already chosen to buy. No new ads, no new products, no new audience. The brand was simply stopping the leak.

Tools & Stack