This direct-to-consumer fashion brand had healthy traffic but leaked revenue across the funnel. DXDasia rebuilt the store experience and paid-media engine around conversion and profitability, lifting return on ad spend to 5.5×.
5.5× ROAS
The brand was spending more each month to acquire fewer customers, with most of the drop-off happening on mobile.
We treated the website and the ad account as one connected system, optimising both toward profit rather than vanity metrics.
Within the engagement the store moved from unprofitable spend to predictable, scalable growth:
The gains came from fixing conversion and acquisition together — a better on-site experience made every ad dollar work harder, and disciplined funnel structure kept costs down as spend scaled. That closed-loop approach is what turned a leaky store into a profitable growth channel.
Rather than optimising the ad account and the website as separate projects, the two were treated as one system reporting to the same profit number. Creative testing was run by collection and season so that what worked for one product line didn’t get blindly applied to another, and the mobile checkout rebuild was prioritised first since that’s where the majority of the original drop-off was concentrated. Every change was measured against blended CAC and profit per order, not surface metrics like click-through rate, so the account stayed accountable to actual margin rather than vanity signals.
Fashion brands usually have traffic but lose it between product page and payment. The sources below are general e-commerce research, not fashion-only studies, so use them to prioritise tests rather than to forecast results.
Baymard's analysis of 50 studies puts the average documented cart abandonment at 70.22%. Of shoppers who gave a reason (excluding 42% who were just browsing), 40% cited extra costs, 20% slow delivery, 18% account creation, 17% a long checkout, 17% website errors or crashes and 13% an unsatisfactory returns policy. For apparel, where sizing doubts make returns terms a purchase factor, that last item deserves a place on the product page, not only the footer.
Deloitte's study for Google covered 37 brand sites and over 30 million sessions and found a 0.1-second mobile speed gain linked to 8.4% higher retail conversion, observed in late 2019. Fashion retailer Farfetch published that conversion dropped 1.3% on average for each extra 100ms of LCP beyond 2.5 seconds, and that its product-page speed work produced a 1-5% uplift in an A/B test. The team is clear that the wider findings are correlations.
Google says product markup can surface price, availability, ratings and shipping information in search, and recommends marking up return policies, including fees and the number of days allowed. For apparel it also supports sizing details in merchant listings. Marked-up pages give shoppers answers before they click.
As competition lifts acquisition costs, existing customers become the cheaper source of revenue. Forrester credits Reichheld of Bain with showing that a 5% retention gain lifts profits 25% to 95%, and says acquiring a customer can cost five to 25 times more than keeping one. Treat both as ranges.
What this means in practice: these figures describe online retail broadly, and a fashion brand with high return rates or heavy mobile traffic may see different results. Use them to decide which checkout and speed tests to run first, then judge the outcome on your own blended acquisition cost and profit per order rather than on benchmarks.
| Friction point | Share of abandoners giving a reason | Practical fix |
|---|---|---|
| Extra costs | 40% | Show shipping and tax on the product page |
| Slow delivery | 20% | State delivery dates before checkout |
| Distrust with card details | 19% | Visible payment badges and a clear brand identity |
| Forced account creation | 18% | Guest checkout |
| Long or complicated checkout | 17% | Fewer fields, saved addresses |
| Unsatisfactory returns policy | 13% | Plain returns terms on every product page |
Reasons for abandonment from [Baymard](https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate); the survey year is not stated on the page.
Fix the leak on mobile first, then let ads and creative testing feed a store that converts.
On an Indian D2C store, we measured a real mobile Lighthouse score of 33 on the homepage, and product pages were far worse, with an LCP of 18 seconds and 5.7 MB. The biggest product-page problem was a scroll-animation library hiding the main image until all JavaScript had run. The lesson we took is to measure every page type, not just the homepage.
With the funnel now profitable at baseline, the brand has room to test new acquisition channels without the previous fear of compounding losses. The conversion-focused page templates built during this engagement are also being reused as the starting point for new product launches, cutting the time from “new collection” to “live and converting” significantly compared to building each launch page from scratch.
Baymard's compilation lists extra costs (40%), slow delivery (20%) and forced accounts (18%) among the leading reasons, excluding people just browsing. Fashion adds sizing and returns worries, so display sizing guidance and returns terms on the product page.
Studies link speed to conversion but not always causally. Deloitte found 8.4% higher retail conversion for a 0.1-second mobile gain, and Farfetch reported a 1-5% uplift from product-page speed work in an A/B test. Test your own store to see the effect.
Fix the biggest conversion leaks first, otherwise extra spend pays for lost visitors. Our conversion rate optimisation and paid media management services treat both as one system, reporting against the same profit number.
Track blended customer acquisition cost, profit per order, average order value, return rate and repeat purchase rate. Platform-reported ROAS can differ from actual orders, so reconcile it with store data before deciding where to put the next pound of budget.
It can. Google says markup can show price, availability, ratings and shipping in search and supports return-policy details. It does not guarantee ranking or richer results, since display is at Google's discretion. Our SEO team handles this on e-commerce builds.
