How we took this online flooring store from
£36k to £1.52m in annual revenue
in 24 months

Buy Flooring Online is an online flooring retailer, specialising in underlay and flooring accessories.

When we first started working with Buy Flooring Online, they were primarily selling directly through their sister company and London-based warehouse and trade counter.

The e-commerce store was set up specifically to help drive online growth, but after 2 years, the Magneto based e-commerce website was seeing minimal traction, despite spending thousands on ads.

After all costs had come out, the business was actually making a loss and struggling to get beyond £10k per month in sales.

At the time we started our engagement the average annual revenue was around £36,000.

The website was not optimised for SEO so getting barely any organic traffic, and also had several major conversion bottlenecks resulting in a poor conversion rate.

The only sales they were getting were coming from paid ads which the Operations Director at the time had set up.

Upon further analysis here we found they were targeting keywords that were far too broad and did not display any level of buyer-intent like:

“Flooring”

“Underlay”

“Carpets”

This is a mistake we often see with companies running ads for the first time.

Whilst this may work for certain retailers with a very large brand presence and lots of credibility, this kind of broad-brush approach often ends up being a complete money pit for smaller businesses.

The initial step was to address the quick-wins, so we started by identifying BFO’s highest margin products as well as products that we had more of a competitive edge in.

We then began optimising the ad campaigns to target only the high-intent keywords for these products with phrases like:

“High-Quality PU Foam Underlay”

“Buy 5L Carpet Adhesive”

The specificity of these searches indicates somebody has already done their research, they know what they want and as such, are further along in the buying process.

We also set up several keyword exclusions for words like “cheap” or “how to” to prevent wasted clicks.

We then incorporated dynamic campaigns with dynamic headlines to match the ad copy to exactly what the user was actually searching for…

This took the company from losing money on ads (£449.63 spend with ZERO revenue generated) to generating over a 20x ROAS within the first month.

Naturally, higher-value items can also attract a higher cost-per-click (CPC), so we had to find the right keywords and delivery mechanisms that allowed us to continue acquiring customers profitably.

Next, we ran an in-depth competitor analysis to understand why certain products had a lower conversion rate.

This is a very overlooked area by many businesses but it’s critical to understand the other options potential buyers have when searching, and being honest with yourself about why (and IF) anyone would realistically choose to buy from you.

We found that some competitors were selling certain underlays by cuts, not just the entire roll. This was making it very difficult for us to compete as they were able to advertise their “from” price as much lower than we were.

At the time, Buy Flooring Online were only able to sell underlay by the roll due to several operational constraints.

As such, we carefully reviewed the products we were bidding on, applied manual bid adjustments to certain product keywords, and removed other categories all together to ensure we maintained high profit-margins.

Finally, we implemented Google Shopping campaigns.

These tend to high a much-higher conversion rate than regular search or display campaigns, as people get to see both the product AND the price within the result itself.

For this reason, shopping ads will often help to reduce wasted clicks as people already know the price before coming through to your product page:

After incorporating website retargeting campaigns into the mix and further refining the products we were targeting, we managed to significantly increase the profitability of ads by focusing-in on the highest-margin products, whilst skyrocketing the overall return-on-ad-spend.

We then looked into their Amazon Seller account which was also costing the business more than it made!

At the time, they were only selling via Amazon FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) which has very high fees. A lot of their items were also incorrectly categorized meaning they were paying higher fees than they needed to, which was eating into their margins, so we updated these to reflect the right categories.

Since they had a warehouse and fulfilment side to the business we advised them to also open up an FBM channel to help increase sale profitability and further reduce Amazon fees.

Due to the competitive nature of this industry, we also knew we had to optimize our listings further to win the “buy box” on Amazon. This is when Amazon pick your brand/product as the default seller for a particular item.

This involved adhering to strict guidelines around clear policies, high-responsiveness and excellent reviews. As such, we helped Buy Flooring Online to implement several internal SOPs and processes to go from an average of 3 stars to around 4.8, becoming a top-rated seller. This resulted in us securing the Buy Box on around 90% of product listings.

After doing some further audience research and analysis, we also started seeing that a lot of customers were actually browsing on eBay first to find new products.

This trend seemed to apply particularly to tradespeople who were an audience we wanted to target due to the higher average order value and repeat order potential

As such, we worked with BFO to create an eBay market places and carry over the internal SOP’s around order fulfilment and customer service.

The result?

1 month after launch = Total Sales: £4,464.00; Units Sold: 93
3 months after launch = Total sales: £16,868.51; Units Sold: 424
6 months after launch = Total sales £36,799.72; Units Sold: 963
12 months after launch = Total Sales: £67,182.74; Units Sold; 1,759

 All completely organically as an additional acquisition stream for the business.

Next, we focused on optimising the website from both a conversion rate perspective.

Firstly we ran several A/B tests on the product page to increase the overall add-to-carts.

This included getting new high-res images of certain products, as well as addressing key questions/doubts as early as possible on the page to remove friction.

We also incorporated a few elements to create a sense of urgency for people take action and buy the product.

These changes alone helped to double the amount of add-to-carts we were getting on product pages.

We also incorporated contextual upsells and cross-sells to the product pages and the cart itself to help increase the average order value on each transaction

Next, we needed to address the abandoned cart rate which was extremely high, at around 92%.

The website had been built on Magento 2.0 with a lot of custom code and was costing them over £10k per year in overall maintenance work alone!

This was complete overkill for a website/business of this size.

At such, we agreed re-build the website on WordPress/WooCommerce, which we deemed to be a much more suitable platform at the time based on the business’s circumstances.

It would also allow us to be much more quick and nimble with making changes and optimisations to boost conversions.

Once the site had been rebuilt, we implemented a fully custom multi-step checkout. We also incorporated benefits statements and reviews to the checkout which helps to build trust.

After implementing these changes and running several additional A/B tests over subsequent months, the abandoned cart rate dropped to just 48%.

All of these changes would help us to ensure there was more profit in each and every sale being generated.

All of these changes combined resulted in almost doubling both the AOV & conversion rate over the next 12 months.

Having addressing the major conversion bottlenecks, we wanted to further improve the user experience.

At the time, Buy Flooring Online were using a remote phone-answering service which was resulting in a lot of lost orders and negative customer reviews.

We analysed the common questions they were getting and created clear FAQ’s on the website to address these concerns.

We also implemented a live-chat widget which filtered out high-intent enquiries to their technical specialists.

Within the first 2 years of making these changes, we helped the store go from being stuck at around £5k per month to breaking through £50k per month, and a further £120K per month from their marketplace channels. All whilst increasing their profit margins month-on-month.

Next, we focused on building up organic traffic through monthly digital PR activities and search engine optimisation.

They had previously invested in spammy SEO tactics from freelancer marketplaces, which resulted in a lot of low-quality links.

This can send warning signs to Google, so we knew getting genuine, high-authority links was going to be important to help rebuild their reputation and get them ranking for the desired keywords.

Initially, this involved securing backlinks from high-authority websites in relevant industries through direct outreach to media publications, as well as competitor link analysis.

We set up a tracker dashboard so they could track new links secured month-on-month.

We then began optimising the content on their website to capitalise on search opportunities.

For example, we noticed a lot of people searching for underlays by room, so we created specific sub-category pages on their website that listed underlays by room, which gives Google a more relevant page to rank for that specific search term.

Alongside the on-page optimisation, we also built out a comprehensive content strategy.

Our copywriters worked with the company’s own subject-matter experts to create highly detailed articles to help us rank for search terms that we knew potential customers would be searching for.

Over the past 36 months, this has taken the website from less than 1,000 keyword rankings with ZERO keywords in position 1, to over 12,500 rankings with over 1,000 keywords in position 1 on Google.

Last but not least, we worked with BFO to implement Klaviyo for their email marketing. This was going to be a critical component to ensure we were increasing the CLTV and maximising the value of every new customer.

Firstly we built out a number of automations from abandoned cart emails to welcome sequences for new customers.

Next, we ran a number of A/B tests on both the sequences and emails themselves to optimise for open rate, CTR and placed order rate.

By utilising regular plain text emails alongside the typical branded HTML emails most companies use, we were able to significantly increase overall engagement and deliverability, as the emails feel more personal and less spammy.

This simple welcome email alone has generated over £5k in additional orders from new customers, as well as a tonne of additional feedback/reviews.