Ecommerce · Beauty & personal care
Grew monthly revenue 2.4x while profit per order went up, not down
The brand was scaling revenue and losing money doing it. Returns and cash-on-delivery refusals were eating a margin the ROAS report said existed.
Finished creative assets shipped per month
Months 1–11 of the engagement
- Client
- D2C skincare brand
- Industry
- Ecommerce · Beauty & personal care
- Region
- Pan-India, Shopify
- Engagement
- Ecommerce growth and Meta ads, 11 months
- Ad budget
- ₹3.5–9 lakh monthly ad spend
The challenge
What was actually going wrong.
Usually not the thing the business thought it was.
The brand had gone from launch to ₹18 lakh a month in about two years, almost entirely on Instagram. On paper it was working: reported ROAS sat around 3.1, and the founder was being told to spend more.
The bank balance disagreed. Once cost of goods, shipping, packaging, payment gateway fees and returns were counted, several of the best-selling products were making almost nothing, and two combination packs were losing money on every order shipped.
Cash-on-delivery made it worse. A third of orders were COD and a third of those never got accepted — but the ad platform still counted them as conversions, so the campaigns were actively learning to find customers who would not pay.
Underneath all of it, four creatives were carrying about 90% of spend and had been running since the previous festive season.
The approach
What we did, in sequence.
Services involved
- 01
Rebuilt the numbers before touching a campaign
Three weeks joining Shopify orders, courier data, returns and ad spend into one view of profit per order per product. The output was uncomfortable and it was the basis for everything after it.
- 02
Repriced and re-tiered the catalogue
Products grouped into margin tiers and pushed into Meta and Google as custom labels, so bidding could tell a ₹90 margin from a ₹600 one. Two loss-making packs were withdrawn entirely.
- 03
Attacked RTO directly
Prepaid discount, WhatsApp order confirmation before dispatch, phone verification on high-value COD orders, and COD switched off in the twenty pincodes with the worst history.
- 04
Rebuilt the creative pipeline
Two shoot days a month plus a small creator roster, briefed from customer reviews and the questions the support inbox answered daily. Output went from roughly three assets a month to twenty-six.
- 05
Scaled against profit, not ROAS
Budget rose in planned steps with a floor on profit per order. Two increases were rolled back within a fortnight when the floor broke — which is the mechanism doing its job.
The result
What moved, and what caused it.
Monthly revenue grew from about ₹18 lakh to ₹43 lakh across eleven months. More importantly, profit per order rose by ₹64 over the same period, so the growth was worth having.
RTO fell from 34% to 19%. Roughly two-thirds of that came from the prepaid incentive and WhatsApp confirmation; the rest came from simply not advertising certain products where they were never accepted.
Creative volume turned out to be the constraint on scale rather than the media buying. Of the four concepts carrying spend at the end of the engagement, none existed when we started.
One thing did not work: a subscription offer tested in month six was taken up by fewer than 2% of buyers and was withdrawn. It is in the reporting because a case study that only lists wins is not much use to anyone.
Measured outcomes
- growth in monthly revenue
- 2.4xgrowth in monthly revenueFrom ₹18 lakh to ₹43 lakh a month over eleven months, with profit per order improving by ₹64 across the same period.
- reduction in RTO rate
- 34% → 19%reduction in RTO rateCash-on-delivery return-to-origin measured across all orders, comparing months 8–11 against the three months before the engagement began.
“We were told for a year that a 3x return meant we were doing well. Finding out which products were actually losing money was the most useful bad news anyone has given us.”
Next step
Bring us a problem shaped like this one.
Forty-five minutes, no slide deck. We will tell you which of these engagements yours most resembles, where we think the bottleneck sits, and what it would realistically take to move it.
Or call +91 93060 49784 and email support@exponentialy.com — we reply within one working day.
What the call is
- 01
45 minutes, no slide deck
You talk to the person who would run the work, not a salesperson.
- 02
Your numbers on the table
What a customer is worth, where enquiries come from, and what you have tried.
- 03
A written plan afterwards
What we would fix first, and in what order. Yours to keep either way.