Pilgrim is an Indian-based brand offering multi-category natural beauty care products, with a focus on vegan, sulfate-free and paraben-free ingredients. Since launching as an online-first brand in 2019, Pilgrim has opened four owned physical stores with an inventory of over 200 SKUs. Pilgrim’s products are also stocked by over 1,000 retailers, contributing to their phenomenal growth.
But with their custom headless online store on Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) struggling to handle everyday traffic volumes and going down during peak sales periods, Pilgrim needed a new platform to unlock scale and ensure stability.
Pilgrim moved to Shopify to meet their growth potential, handle traffic fluctuations, and maximize conversions during its flash sales three times every year.
Since moving to Shopify, Pilgrim has seen:
- 1,556 transactions per minute
- 22.4% conversion rate during flash sales
- 10x increase in website traffic
- Approximately 100% year-on-year increase in revenue
The challenge: Scalability to support spiking demand
With three key flash sales periods per year, Pilgrim focuses on serving their customers quality products of good value, at speed. To maintain these famous sales that help attract and retain customers, they needed a platform which could handle spiked traffic—something that their previous Adobe Commerce storefront couldn’t do, often leading to website crashes during pivotal sales moments.
Alongside managing traffic inflow and transactions, Pilgrim needed deeper visibility and analysis of purchasing data and trends. Their previous platform offered basic dashboards that lacked key insights and analytics to improve conversion rates over time, which meant enhancing the customer journey and checkout was challenging.
As they were seeing an increase of 30x in the concurrent website users during flash sales, Pilgrim realized that their growth was stunted due to the limitations of the third-party checkout system, which included a lack of seamless analytics and attribution and constantly hitting Shopify’s rate limits during high traffic volumes. By switching to Shopify’s native checkout, which has no rate limits and better handles scalability, Pilgrim could unlock their full growth potential.
The solution: Stability and speed at any stage of growth
Pilgrim initially considered Shopify due to its breadth of capabilities and platform integrations which lent themselves well to improving their checkout and supporting the stability of their entire commerce system. In terms of scalability to handle peak traffic periods, Pilgrim also quickly realized that Shopify’s cloud-based solutions meant that we could be a long-term partner with high flexibility for growth.
We never expected to scale so easily with Shopify. I was prepared for Pilgrim to potentially outgrow Shopify at the rate we were expanding, but quickly realized that the platform truly has unlimited scale to support our growth.
To manage their peak flash sale periods, Pilgrim used automation capabilities on Shopify Flow to streamline operations and handle increased order volumes. For example, they now use Shopify Flow to automate fraud order identification, action complex order processing logics with 3PLs, and segment customers for hyper-targeted marketing campaigns.
With Shopify, we can access a whole host of integrations and features without spending a lot of time. Finding the right features to meet the unique needs of our business, such as restricting users to order a limited quantity of flash sale items, and managing high concurrent traffic without thinking about server management, means that we can quickly see results and ROI on the platform functionality.
Thanks to some advanced Shopify features, such as Shopify Functions and Checkout UI extensions, Pilgrim was able to build private apps with their internal technology for advanced use cases, such as collecting cash on delivery (COD) fees from customers, showing available coupons at the time of the checkout, and validating customer’s pincode serviceability before accepting orders.
Pilgrim also implemented Checkout Extensibility to enhance the customer experience by offering a one-page checkout experience, helping the brand remain competitive by boosting the cross-selling of related categories, adding free gifts or samples directly to customer baskets, and driving faster checkouts. This feature empowered the business to increase average order value and overall conversion.
Since moving to Shopify, the biggest impact was our platform stability. We can now focus on marketing promotions, events, and sales without worry, and handle thousands of orders a minute during our busiest periods. I have seen first hand that transaction volume doesn't have to come at the expense of stability.
The result: Beauty, scalability, and stability in a flash
Since moving to Shopify, Pilgrim has the confidence in their commerce platform to handle their record-breaking peak sales seasons—from 1,233 orders per minute (also on Shopify) in April, to a 26% increase to 1,556 orders per minute in August. By utilizing features like Shopify functions, multi-pass for authentication, concurrent traffic queue management and increased API rate limits, Pilgrim is seeing consistent YoY increase in revenue, without the worry of hitting limitations within the platform.
With Shopify Plus, Pilgrim saw results fast.
- 1,556 transactions per minute
- 22.4% conversion rate during flash sales
- 10x increase in website traffic
- Approximately 100% year-on-year increase in revenue