AMR Hair & Beauty was founded in Sydney in 2004 by then-16-year-old Ammar Issa. Today, AMR is one Australia's leading hair and beauty suppliers, selling to businesses and consumers across five brick-and-mortar locations and online.
After seven years of what Ammar describes as “torture” trying to do business with an unreliable ecommerce platform, AMR Hair & Beauty moved to Shopify Plus to improve reliability, page loading speed and user experience. The switch improved reliability and reduced page load times, contributing to an immediate increase in sales. In addition, advanced search functionality and customization on the checkout page led to a rise in average order value and conversion rate.
With Shopify Plus, AMR Hair & Beauty has seen:
- 200% increase in sales
- 77% rise in B2B average order value
- 93% year-over-year growth in conversion rate
The challenge
AMR Hair & Beauty previously used WordPress with WooCommerce for its online ecommerce store, but the website was difficult to customize, had slow page loading speeds and was prone to crashing during peak sales events.
“The site would crash in the middle of Black Friday and it would take us hours to get it back up,” said Issa. Consequently, AMR Hair & Beauty ended up redirecting site traffic from its regular ecommerce store to a pop-up store powered by Shopify during sales events.
In addition to the known reliability and speed issues, a customer survey by AMR Hair & Beauty revealed that customers wanted better search and filtering options. With over 6,000 products to choose from, it was difficult for customers to narrow their search results. B2B customers were particularly frustrated, as the search results wouldn’t show them B2B pricing and incentives, and it was cumbersome to find products with a specific ingredient. This meant that B2B customers tended to order in more traditional ways, via phone or email, undermining the substantial effort that went into customizing and maintaining the WordPress site.
Another common request from customers was a smoother checkout process. While AMR Hair & Beauty was willing to oblige with this request, the brand was unable to locate the point of friction with WordPress. The platform simply couldn’t provide the data and analytics required to inform decision making. This resulted in many abandoned carts and lost revenue.
The solution
AMR Hair & Beauty switched to Shopify Plus in September 2023 to provide its customers with a better online experience. The brand saw immediate improvements to page loading speed and average session duration. Moreover, the move gave AMR Hair & Beauty confidence that its website wouldn’t break following customizations or during peak sales periods.
Drawing upon Shopify Plus’s improved B2B functionality, AMR Hair & Beauty added better search and filtering options to its wholesale store. This meant wholesale buyers could swiftly narrow down their search results and view products alongside B2B pricing and incentives.
AMR Hair & Beauty also used improved data intelligence from Shopify QL Notebooks, a Shopify-native app that empowers merchants to query, explore, and visualize their business data. This helped the brand successfully optimize its checkout process and enable it to continue making customizations in response to changing customer behavior.
The results
With Shopify Plus, AMR Hair & Beauty has tripled sales—thanks in part to the improved reliability of its ecommerce store and its page load time dropping by over half. Broadly, the switch to Shopify Plus has seen customers linger on the site for longer, add more items to cart, and spend more.
In addition, B2B on Shopify has allowed AMR Hair & Beauty’s wholesale customers to find what they need quickly and progress to checkout with minimal effort. Providing B2B customers with better search and filtering options, as well as clarity around pricing and incentives, has led to a substantial rise in B2B average order value.
The detailed analytics and reporting abilities of Shopify Plus, combined with its customizable checkout, has also proved valuable, helping AMR Hair & Beauty improve its conversion rate by nearly double within the space of a month.
Now that its Australian ecommerce store is working well, AMR Hair & Beauty is planning to expand into New Zealand. AMR Hair & Beauty anticipates that the Shopify Plus expansion stores feature will be instrumental in growing its global footprint.
With Shopify Plus, AMR Hair & Beauty saw results fast:
- 200% increase in sales
- 77% rise in B2B average order value
- 93% growth in conversion rate year on year
Right now, we have two login options, one for public consumers and one for B2B customers. We have ten different pricing tiers for B2B customers, and Shopify automatically shows them the right one based on their customer status.
A customizable checkout is just one part of the puzzle. Having a fast website and advanced search capabilities creates momentum.
We’re tracking the performance of our website and based on that we will tweak the cart/checkout page. We couldn’t do that with our old platform.
