esmi slashes online store maintenance costs by 85%

Based on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, esmi was born out of a desire to create unique makeup and skin care products that are easy to use, quick to apply, and fast to deliver results. Since its humble beginnings in 2013, esmi has grown to encompass multiple boutique skincare and beauty brands, including PONi Cosmetics, Lip Heroes, and Sun Skills. The brand’s extensive range of affordable and easy-to-use products has drawn fans not only in Australia, but around the world.

Since upgrading to Shopify, esmi has seen:

• 85% reduction in web maintenance costs
• 40x increase in concurrent traffic on its sites
• 19% rise in the rate of returning customers

Challenge

Ecommerce sites are central to esmi success because the online channel is a major part of the brand’s consumer and wholesale strategies. However, the platform it previously used to handle its online sales struggled to host more than a few hundred customers at a time, and it would frequently crash if too many people tried to find and buy products at once. To prevent this from happening, the brand had to stagger its promotional emails to customers, making marketing activities unnecessarily complicated and time consuming.

Due to the limitations of its previous ecommerce platform, esmi had to spin up five individual sites, one for each of its labels, its US presence, and its wholesale channel. But given the work needed to maintain each site and fix bugs in the platform as they arose—much of which needed to be handed off to an external agency—the brand was unable to invest in and execute on new online store features for customers and its own internal team. This prevented esmi from attaining the growth velocity it wanted to achieve as a business. Not only that, but a lack of data management tools meant that it faced huge problems in achieving personalization for customers based on their location, such as customers in the EU and USA. This led to additional sales losses.

Solution

esmi launched its new online stores on Shopify in June 2022. Employing the Shopify Plus expansion store feature, esmi consolidated its five independent sites into a single platform with three defined storefronts: one to host its brands in the local market, another to do the same in the US market, and a third for its wholesale business. Thanks to the unified backend of Shopify Plus, each of these sites was managed via a single admin page, making multi-site management less resource intensive.

At the same time, esmi used Shopify Flow to automate numerous ecommerce tasks that previously could not be automated, including the allocation of the most appropriate free product sample to be offered to customers as a gift based on the detection of specific products in their orders. Such automations have freed up team resources so that esmi can invest more in developing and creating new store features and offerings.

Results

With Shopify, esmi can now host thousands of customers on any of its sites at any time, giving the brand the ability to send promotional emails to all of its customers at once without the fear that its sites will buckle under the weight of online visitors. This was particularly important during the 2022 Black Friday, Cyber Monday sale period, when esmi hosted some 8,000 online customers at the same time without incident.

Thanks to Shopify, the brand has also enjoyed a dramatic reduction in website maintenance costs. The team has shifted substantial resources from maintenance and support tasks to focus on the delivery of compelling new online features and services for customers and internal team members alike. Most notably, while the traffic volume on esmi’s collective sites has exploded, the ecommerce team’s productivity has also increased thanks to labor-saving tools like Shopify Flow.

With new product category ranges, new brands, and new international launches in the works, esmi plans to take further advantage of the all-in-one ecommerce system Shopify offers to continue driving its long-term growth goals.

With Shopify, esmi saw results fast.

• 85% reduction in web maintenance costs
• 40x increase in concurrent traffic on its sites
• 19% rise in the rate of returning customers