Ziga and I have been working together on and off for a few years now. I ran his ads long before I ran a single experiment on his store.
So when I started offering CRO and asked whether I could test on Sailbrace, he didn’t have many questions. He told me to get on with it. He already knew what it would be worth: on the volume of traffic Sailbrace was pulling, a better average order value and a better conversion rate don’t just show up as revenue and profit. They lift the break-even on every campaign, which means you can afford to spend more to buy the next customer.
There was a second job underneath the first. A lot of money had gone to a string of cheap outsourced developers over the years, and not all of it bought good work. So alongside the testing there was fixing to do — making the store stable enough, and owned enough, to keep building on.
Nothing was broken. That’s the harder brief.
There was no burning problem to fix. Sailbrace already had a healthy store and a lot of traffic. The brief was simpler and harder than a rescue: convert more of the volume that was already there.
That kind of brief doesn’t come with an obvious first move — but it was never for lack of ideas. Between us we’d built up years of them, a long list of things we’d always meant to try. Anyone can produce a hundred ideas for a store. Knowing which three are worth putting live traffic behind is the part that’s actually hard, and getting that wrong costs you weeks you don’t get back.
The gift-packaging module was the best thing we built
The gift-packaging upsell on the product pages was the one I’d wanted to get at for a long time. We rebuilt it, ran it for 58 days, and it came back +15.4% revenue per visitor and +14.3% conversion rate.
The sample wasn’t enormous, and I’d rather say that than dress it up. But it was a clear enough win to act on, so it went live across the product pages. What’s convinced me since isn’t the test — it’s what happened after. Look at the data now and the number of gift-packaging add-ons Sailbrace sells has more than tripled. That’s margin the store wasn’t collecting before, on an option customers evidently wanted.
The product page itself came next. The old template carried a lot of content nobody needed, so we cut it and condensed what survived. Over 59 days: +6.4% revenue per visitor, +5.2% conversion rate. Rolled out.
Those two carry the collaboration. One module and one template, both still live, both moving revenue per visitor the right way.
Owning the bundler instead of renting one
Sailbrace sells accessories, which means a low average order value by default. When the basket is small, the single most valuable thing you can do is get people to take two or three instead of one — so a buy-more-save-more bundler isn’t a nice-to-have on this store, it’s close to structural.
The normal route is to install an app like Kaching Bundles and pay for it forever. We built our own instead. Same job, no subscription, and we own the thing — which means it behaves exactly how we want, and we can change it whenever we like rather than filing a feature request with someone else’s roadmap.
It ran 25 days and returned +8.2% revenue per visitor and +6.5% average order value. Units per order went up meaningfully. Honestly, we didn’t run it long enough for the result to be airtight, and we knew that when we called it — but the direction was consistent, the module clearly earns its place, and we wanted it live rather than sitting in a draft for another month.
The other one was simpler. Paid bike traffic was going to a dedicated landing page; we sent it straight to the bike collection instead. Over 27 days: +5.1% revenue per visitor, +9.1% conversion rate. Average order value actually dropped 3.7%, which tells you the collection route wins by bringing in more orders rather than bigger ones. Rolled out.
We stopped renting the cart
The cart drawer was built on Rebuy, and we were paying an absurd amount every month for it. Expensive, not especially transparent, and more limited than something at that price has any business being. Replacing it mattered to me more than the test result did.
So we built a new one. Run head to head over 26 days, it lost: −9.2% revenue per visitor, −8.4% conversion rate. Not a close call, and the sample was on the small side, but a loss is a loss and I’m not going to argue it into a win.
We shipped it anyway, and I’d make the same call again. It killed the Rebuy subscription outright, which paid for the build in short order. It means we own the cart — so instead of leasing the highest-intent surface on the site, we can iterate on it as fast as we like until it’s genuinely right. And it does things the old one couldn’t:
- The bundler now carries through into the cart, with tiers that unlock as the basket grows — free shipping, then further discounts.
- The gift-packaging module sits in the cart too, which is a large part of why those sales have climbed the way they have.
- The upsell runs horizontally instead of vertically, so it does the same work while taking far less of the drawer.
- The terms-and-conditions checkbox got rebuilt. We’d tested that separately, splitting traffic between a pre-ticked box and an empty one, and the pre-ticked version was worth +3.4% revenue per visitor — the old checkbox was simply hard to see and easy to miss, and people stalled on it. We can’t legally keep a box pre-ticked, so we did the next best thing and made it obvious.
The menu I preferred, and the menu we kept
We weren’t unhappy with the old navigation. This one was ambition rather than repair: Sailbrace buyers tend to commit hard to a single category — their sport — so I wanted a menu that was far more visual about getting them there, on mobile and desktop both.
It came back flat after 37 days. Neither a win nor a loss.
I preferred the new one, and I’d put real time into it. But it isn’t my store and it isn’t my call. Ziga would rather keep the old menu, so the old menu stayed. When the data doesn’t make the decision for you, the person whose brand it is gets to make it.
Still working together
Across everything we’ve tested on Sailbrace, roughly two in three have come back up on revenue per visitor. That’s a high rate, and I’d rather tell you the rate than parade the winners — a testing programme is judged on the whole set, not on the highlight reel.
What’s live today is a product page that earns more per visitor, a gift-packaging module selling several times what it used to, a bundler we own outright that pushes a low-AOV store toward bigger baskets, and a cart that costs nothing in subscriptions and can be improved whenever we want. The menu went back to what it was. The cart lost its test and stayed anyway, for reasons that had nothing to do with the number.
Years in, I’m still working with Ziga — and still testing.
Ziga put it better than I would:
Honestly, Jeppe is awesome. Two years of working together has been amazing and transformed our business results.
— Ziga Luksa, CEO, Sailbrace
