Maximum impact with a lean team

For a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand like DefenAge, their website is their entire business. Small shifts in how visitors move through the site directly translate into revenue gained or revenue lost. 

DefenAge didn’t have a conversion rate optimization program in place, let alone a testing cadence. 

Without an analyst to sift through website data, decisions about what to test were largely based on opinions and assumptions. DefenAge knew there were opportunities to improve the site, but they didn't have a reliable way to identify where those opportunities were.

“We just needed a smarter solution, something that could help us test out real human behavior and not just guesses and opinions.”

- Annette Berg, VP of Intelligent Customer Experience at DefenAge

Even when they had an idea worth testing, turning it into an experiment could take weeks because of limited developer bandwidth and competing priorities. 

With just two people focused on the work, DefenAge needed a way to continuously improve the site without adding headcount or pulling more time away from other teams.

Shuttlebase took over DefenAge's entire CRO process. The system analyzed how real visitors moved through the site, identified where they hesitated or dropped off, and started building experiments to fix what it found, all without requiring any development time from the DefenAge team.

The first opportunity Shuttlebase found was on the homepage. Visitors were landing on the page and leaving before they ever reached a product. The data showed that high-intent shoppers had no clear path from the homepage into the catalog. 

Shuttlebase hypothesized that giving visitors a more direct route to the full product catalog could reduce that drop-off.

The system autonomously designed a "Shop All Products" button just below the first fold. For shoppers who already knew they wanted to browse, the button provided a highly visible path into the full catalog instead of requiring them to find their way through the navigation.

After running the test for 24 days, the variant with the “Shop All Products” button won. 16.9% of visitors reached a product page from the homepage. One simple button generated an additional $167,600 in earned revenue and also increased purchase conversion by 26%. 

This is the kind of test that might sound obvious in retrospect, but without Shuttlebase’s AI driven data analysis to surface the opportunity, no one on the team knew that what the homepage needed was a more direct route to the catalog.

The homepage was only the start. Once the loop was running, Shuttlebase kept finding and testing improvements across the rest of the site.

Each experiment followed the same cycle: a hypothesis about one specific point of friction, a variant the AI designed and coded, a test measured against real visitor behavior, and a clear winner or loser.

Over 12 months, the experiments Shuttlebase ran for DefenAge generated $600,000 in revenue uplift, with more tests still in the pipeline.

• 14% increase in conversion rate
• 14% increase in AOV
• 30% increase in RPV

"Shuttlebase and the team are so great to work with. They feel like an extension of our own team. I'd definitely recommend Shuttlebase to other businesses. If you have a lean team that doesn't have the time to focus on development but you want to improve conversions, this is the way to go."

- Annette Berg, VP of Intelligent Customer Experience at DefenAge

DefenAge did not need a big CRO team or a full site rebuild to grow. They needed a system that could find hidden opportunities, test a fix, and keep the next experiment moving.

Now, continuous optimization with Shuttlebase runs alongside the rest of the business, without requiring another developer, analyst, or dedicated CRO hire.