Converting content into commerce

Alembika's content strategy was bringing the right women to the site, but they ran into a problem when it came to optimizing the site to convert those visitors into buyers. 

Alin Wagner, VP of Marketing & eCommerce of this premium women's apparel brand, ran the site's A/B testing effort largely on her own, coordinating analytics tools, a UX designer, a developer, and a separate testing platform just to launch a single experiment.

The entire process was expensive, slow, and hard to scale. Every idea for what to test started with Alin's instinct, because the analytics tool lacked the ability to show what parts of the website needed improvement. 

When they did decide to run a test, the process from hypothesis to result dragged on long enough that the team could only run a handful of experiments per quarter.

Shuttlebase replaced Alembika’s testing vendor stack with one platform. Instead of coordinating between multiple teams just to get a single experiment live, the team could identify opportunities, build tests, and measure results in one place.

Shuttlebase starts by analyzing how Alembika's visitors actually move through the site. It finds where they drop off, and where revenue is being lost. 

In Alembika’s case, Shuttlebase found the first opportunity was in their editorial content. 

Women were arriving through lookbooks and magazine content, engaging with the brand, and leaving without ever seeing a product page. The content worked as an opener, but there was no natural path from reading to shopping.

Shuttlebase hypothesized that adding a low-friction path from editorial content to the product catalog would convert readers without disrupting the editorial experience. 

The system proposed a small, non-intrusive pop-up in the bottom-left corner of each magazine page, giving readers a chance to shop what they were viewing. If a woman was browsing a lookbook featuring a particular collection, one click would take her straight to those products.

While the Alembika team was initially hesitant about adding a pop-up, they decided to run a test across all magazine pages on mobile and desktop. 

After 29 days, 27.7% of visitors who saw the Shuttlebase variant reached a product listing page, a 6.7% increase compared with the control. 

Visitors were no longer just reading the content, they were moving into the shopping experience. 

"I was initially against it [adding a pop-up]. I thought it would interrupt the experience. And I remember arguing with you guys. And you implemented it, and I was proven wrong very, very quickly."

- Alin Wagner, VP of Marketing & eCommerce, Alembika

Alembika had an entire content operation generating qualified traffic that it wasn't monetizing. Shuttlebase found the gap and gave those visitors a path to purchase.

But the opportunities didn’t stop there. 

The next opportunity Shuttlebase found was on Alembika's product listing pages. 

On mobile, the original layout showed the full collection description at the top of the page, pushing the products below the fold. A woman landing on "Dresses, Skirts & Culottes" had to scroll past a paragraph of copy before she saw a single dress. 

Shuttlebase tested a variant that moved the description to the bottom of the page, putting product images front and center as soon as the page loaded.

After running the test for over a month, the variant won the test, lifting purchase conversion by 10.5%, and average order value by 11.6%. It also generated a staggering additional $114,100 in revenue.

On a mobile screen, every inch of space above the fold makes a difference. For a premium fashion brand where the product photography plays a major role in the buying decision, pushing it below a block of descriptive text was costing Alembika revenue without the team realizing it.

The team that once ran a handful of tests per quarter now had a system that continuously identified and fixed friction across the site.

Over the last year, Alembika saw an overall: 

• 9.3% increase in add to cart rate
• 3% increase in conversion rate
• 23.2% increase in Revenue Per Visitor (RPV)

For a brand with a high bar for its on-site experience, Shuttlebase's ability to create test variants that matched Alembika's existing design language and brand experience was another important benefit.

The bigger impact wasn't a single winning test. It was giving a small team a way to continuously find opportunities, test them, and turn hidden friction into measurable revenue.