How SuitShop Scaled 600% International Growth with Shopify Plus

Background

SuitShop launched via a successful 2016 Kickstarter campaign to deliver high-quality suits at prices below rental costs. From day one the founders knew they needed an online platform built for growth and efficiency. With a small team of under 30 people, they could not afford slow manual processes or shipping headaches.

Early Challenges

Early returns required manual tracking, forms, labels and emails. Every day the team spent hours processing refunds and replacements. At the same time, international orders often failed due to customs delays, duties miscalculations and lost packages. They nearly cut off global customers entirely because fulfillment costs were running higher than revenue from those sales.

Implementing Shopify Plus

After comparing several platforms, SuitShop upgraded to Shopify Plus for its blend of power, extensibility and competitive pricing. The team customized checkouts with Shop Pay for one-click payments and Shop Pay Installments so customers could split purchases interest-free. This combination cut friction immediately and improved average order value on wedding suits, which aren’t small discretionary buys.

Enabling Cross-Border Sales

To fix broken global shipping, they added Managed Markets. This solution handled customs paperwork, duty calculation and tax remittance automatically. It also provided a Merchant of Record service with daily pickups from international warehouses. Issues dropped from 50% of orders failing to zero, unlocking a 600% surge in international volume and a 32% bump in cross-border conversion.

App Integrations for Efficiency

Loop Returns gave the team full control over processing returns, removing manual review tasks. TryNow let engaged couples see and feel suits before purchase, reducing refund requests. Together these apps freed up hours of daily work and kept customer satisfaction high even when mistakes happened.

POS for On-the-Go Sales

With Shopify POS, SuitShop sold at six showrooms and at wedding expos across the country. The team created orders on the spot, checked live inventory across locations, and express-shipped emergency suits to save big days. POS reporting also helped maintain lean stock levels without overordering.

Results

From 2020 to 2023, SuitShop grew revenue by an average of 117% each year while holding 18% EBITDA margins. International orders climbed 600% and conversion on those orders rose by 32%. Return processing time fell by over 70%, and shipping failure rates went from half of all packages to zero.

Conclusion

SuitShop has never looked back after moving to Shopify Plus. The combination of a scalable platform, specialized apps, and streamlined cross-border tools gave a lean team the power to compete with much larger retailers. As they expand globally and open more showrooms, the same setup will support their next stages of growth.