Founded in 1984, Monte Carlo has become one of the largest legacy clothing brands in India, and is the number one winter wear brand in the country. After becoming an icon of winterwear, Monte Carlo has since created all-season staples to attract consumers of a wider age range, boasting a permanent place in the Indian fast-fashion readymade market.
With a promise to set themselves apart by providing originality and launching something new in the mainstream market, Monte Carlo has been looking at the future while inspiring the nation with their passion for lifestyle and fashion since its inception, always focusing on creativity and placing original designs at the center of their business with pieces that stand out on their own.
Although Monte Carlo has a well-established retail presence of over 1400 stores, the brand’s online business is increasingly important, making up over 11% of total revenue. With the online store such a key channel for Monte Carlo, the brand wanted to optimize it by delivering a great user experience. But the customizations needed to make it more user-friendly were slow and expensive to implement, as they required extensive coding in the original platform.
Turning to the Shopify Plus plan, Monte Carlo quickly transformed their online user experience with built-in, easy-to-customize features, boosting revenue, transaction, and customer return rates.
The best part about Shopify is that it’s like an ocean: it has everything built inside. We have the freedom to pick and choose the best features suitable for our brand rather than build it from scratch. With Shopify, Monte Carlo can deliver the best online experiences for our loyal customers across India and abroad.
Since moving to Shopify, Monte Carlo has seen:
- 126% increase in online revenue within 3 months
- 115% increase in transactions within 3 months
- 493% increase in returning customers within 3 months
The challenge: Costly customizations cut into profit potential
Monte Carlo’s online business was originally built on Laravel, where any customized changes to the brand’s online store required extensive coding from a team of developers. This was a problem, given that user interface and experience issues were limiting customer engagement and the return on investment (ROI) the retailer could obtain with the platform.
For instance, when Monte Carlo wanted to display promotional offers—such as 10% cashback—to new customers on the site, it was difficult to make the message prominent on the Laravel platform, even with code-based customizations, leading to customer confusion. Likewise, the checkout process involved multiple unavoidable steps, prompting customers to abandon purchases.
With no built-in upsell or cross-sell tools available, Monte Carlo had to create their own solution. But with the extensive coding needed to make such solutions work well, Monte Carlo expended considerable developer resources for a result that was less than ideal. Poor website responsiveness didn’t help, with customers dropping off when pages took too long to load.
Because Laravel is not a cloud-native platform, Monte Carlo hosted it on AWS. But every time Monte Carlo saw an influx of customers online, such as during the popular winter season, the AWS hosting requirements would spike, driving up hosting expenses, sometimes by up to 24x the usual costs. Even then, the website would sometimes crash under the strain of the elevated online traffic.
In trying to manage the traffic during our peak seasons, the web hosting costs on AWS would spike, meaning that ROI was not as close to our target as we’d like, especially since the existing user experience wasn’t converting as well as it should have been. So, even though we were getting spikes in traffic, they weren’t translating into sales.
The solution: Built-in tools streamline customer experience
Monte Carlo partnered with Mojito Labs to implement the Shopify Plus plan in late 2023, migrating from Laravel in just four months. The brand quickly used Shopify’s built-in features to improve customer experience. For example, with Shopify’s one-page checkout, Monte Carlo slashed the number of steps customers needed to make a purchase, reducing cart abandonment. Because upselling features were built into Shopify, it was easy for Monte Carlo to surface personalized recommendations when shoppers are browsing and buying, such as a winter cap that can be paired with a winter jacket.
The prebuilt Shopify theme Monte Carlo chose instantly brought a more customer-friendly design to their online store, while the responsiveness of the Shopify platform has reduced page load times, also contributing to an improvement in customer experience. The ability to customize those elements that still require further personalization without extensive coding meant Monte Carlo could make the changes it wanted to without draining their resources.
With Shopify, you get multiple user interface and user experience options that are already developed and tested, contributing to better conversion rates. For a brand like us, we don’t have a lot of time for research and development when it comes to the latest and greatest commerce tools. Shopify does all of that for us. We can always get what we need.
Shopify’s built-in tools made it easy to quickly improve customer experience. For instance, Monte Carlo used Shopify’s native customer notification features to create a popup message alerting customers to the brand’s 10% cashback offer. The messaging solution was implemented quickly and created a clear, easy way to communicate that customers readily noticed, removing any potential confusion over the offer. The offer was also auto applied in the shopping cart without extra steps from the customer.
Because the user interface and experience features in Shopify have been prebuilt and tested by Shopify, Monte Carlo had a broad selection of tools, such as upsell and cross-sell solutions, that they could try out to optimize their online store without having to use up expensive developer time coding everything from scratch and testing each solution internally.
Moreover, with Shopify’s native cloud hosting, Monte Carlo no longer needs to purchase AWS hosting for their online store, removing a substantial and unpredictable cost to the brand’s online business while also dramatically reducing the chances of the website crashing due to influxes of traffic. In fact, since Monte Carlo moved to Shopify, their site hasn’t gone down once.
Monte Carlo also used a number of plugin solutions from the Shopify App Store to streamline their sales processes and improve customer experience. For example, the brand used the Matrixify app to manage and store their data, the Flits customer account page app for customer wishlists, and the Retafy customer retention app to handle loyalty program points.
The results: A better user interface powers online sales
In the first three months after migrating to the Shopify Plus plan Monte Carlo saw a 126% rise in online revenue and a 115% increase in transactions online, largely driven by the improvements in the user interface and experience that Shopify’s built-in tools and features offered them. Moreover, the brand has witnessed a 493% increase in returning customers, lured back by a great online experience.
Plus, Monte Carlo has been able to halve their server costs in the absence of needing to host their online store on AWS and avoid unexpected price spikes and crashes during traffic peaks at busy periods. The lower server costs and the resources redeployed from previously developer-heavy tasks have combined to create a much better ROI for the brand’s website.
The brand’s new site is fast, stable, and highly responsive, with customers less likely to leave before they finalize their purchases, a factor that is also driving conversion. This higher conversion rate, also powered by a range of stock user experience tools and features on the Shopify platform, such as its one-page checkout, has further improved Monte Carlo’s website ROI.
Now, with Shopify giving Monte Carlo the built-in features and easy customization they need to boost customer experience, the brand is looking at other ways to improve their online engagement even further through faster delivery, virtual fitting rooms, and more personalization—an especially important capability as Monte Carlo pursues international expansion.
The best part about Shopify is that it’s like an ocean: it has everything built inside. We have the freedom to pick and choose the best features suitable for our brand rather than build it from scratch. With Shopify, Monte Carlo can deliver the best online experiences for our loyal customers across India and abroad.
