Ellana Cosmetics customizes checkout and uses Shopify Flow to boost average order value by 17%

In 2007, Theresa Carbonel and Coney Avellana founded Ellana Cosmetics to answer a simple question: Can beauty products do better both for your skin and the planet? The homegrown brand—which began selling at local markets in the Philippines—has steadily grown into an ecommerce giant that now provides high-performance, eco-friendly skincare to hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide.

Challenge

Ellana started as a predominantly cash-based business, with transactions occurring at local bazaars and on forums. But Theresa and Coney saw an opportunity to reach more customers and boost revenue by bringing transactions online through a website of their own. They started with a basic HTML website and later experimented with products from Adobe Commerce and WooCommerce. They were unsatisfied with the results of these platforms for three main reasons: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.

• Many sales in the Philippines occur with a ‘cash on delivery (COD)’ model, meaning revenue is not recognized upfront. The team’s inability to customize the checkout experience to account for COD led to a high checkout failure rate.
• The team saw an opportunity to increase its average order value (AOV) with product bundling, but this had to be done manually, sapping valuable time and resources.
• Ellana needed a scalable solution that could support its international expansion goals without the team needing to manage multiple storefronts and payment solutions on separate accounts.

Solution

Ellana turned to Hyperdrv Digital to help overhaul its ecommerce operations. Hyperdrv provided strategy, operations, and digital marketing support to Ellana, upgrading to Shopify during a time when ecommerce marketing was still in its infancy in the Philippines. This allowed Ellana to consolidate its tech stack, and the team further accelerated growth and efficiency by upgrading to Shopify Plus soon after.

The team enabled Shopify Flow, which helped it automate time-intensive backend functions like fulfillment, fraud checks, and payment processing. Ellana could also now modify the checkout experience to include more detailed customer information and reduce the risk of ‘return to sender’ checkout failures, which were eating into revenue. It also allowed for creative upsells and gifts with purchases that quickly became customer favorites.

Ellana also separated its sales channels by creating individual store instances for online customers, brick-and-mortar shoppers, influencer and affiliate partners, and internal employees. This solution gave the team greater visibility into store inventory levels, which helped improve order fulfillment. It enabled a much more granular level of customer experience personalisation that could be replicated in other markets.

Results

Ellana has radically transformed its ecommerce experience, enabling it to be the number one cosmetics brand in the Philippines.

Thanks to the robust customisations available with Shopify Plus, Ellana has reduced checkout failure by 40%, unlocking more revenue and de-risking online transactions. Implementing timely upsells has increased its average order value by 17%, and creating multiple sites has opened up more creative marketing strategies to seed products with content creators and influencers.

Having successfully cracked the local market, Ellana Cosmetics is now primed for successful and scalable international growth.