Case Study: Lavish Shoestring grows UK antique e-commerce with Vasterra

Lavish shoestring boosts average order value by 83% with Vasterra

Lavish Shoestring, an online platform for selling antiques in the UK, faced the challenge of scaling its business within an inherently offline market. Their vision was to create a digital, scalable, and fun platform for users, but they were hindered by cumbersome manual processes like photographing and describing each unique item. They hired Vasterra to design and implement a sophisticated platform to overcome these obstacles.

Vasterra implemented a solution featuring automation and machine learning. This included code to automatically detect products in images, recognize their characteristics, and generate descriptions, which decreased overhead costs by over 18%. They also developed a machine learning algorithm to determine optimal pricing and automated A/B testing to improve product rankings on external marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy. As a result, Vasterra increased the average purchase amount per order by 83% in under six months and increased customer lifetime value by more than 147% within a year.

Lavish shoestring