“What I found most impressive is that we've had about a 28% decrease in support tickets, thanks to Order Editing.”
The brand
AKT was started by Ed and Andy, who met performing in the same show. The origin story is exactly as unglamorous as it should be: one of them was told he stank. They went away and made body care that holds up under stage lights.
The language of the brand still comes from the theatre. Stepping onto your stage. Not breaking character.
"I'm Aaron, front of house manager here at AKT, a personal performance brand creating high performing, award-winning body care."
Before Order Editing, the only tool was a refund
"We were seeing lots of high volumes of either people wanting to cancel orders, edit orders, or even edit their shipping address — especially with the subscription-based products that we've got. And unfortunately we were unable to do that and fulfil those requests, which then led to us having to offer them the return solution, which was then costing us a hell of a lot of money on processing fees and also return labels."
Most brands describe the cost of order edits in minutes: agents, queues, time-sensitivity. Aaron describes it in refunds.
That's the more expensive version of the problem. A customer who wanted a different fragrance, or their new address on the parcel, couldn't be given either — so the answer was: let it ship, send it back, we'll refund you. AKT paid the outbound postage, the return label and the payment processing fees to undo something the customer could have changed themselves in thirty seconds.
"So in order to try and bring those costs down, and also give the customers a better experience, we needed to look for something like Order Editing to help fill that gap that we currently had."
Two edit windows, not one
This is the part of AKT's setup worth copying.
Most brands pick one window and apply it to everything. AKT run two, because a subscription renewal and a one-off purchase aren't the same event and don't have the same deadline.
Subscribers get until 10am on the day their order builds. Recharge pulls the subscription orders at four or five in the morning, so the deadline is set by the pick, not by the purchase. A subscriber can wake up, remember they wanted a different fragrance this month, and change it before anyone in the warehouse has touched it.
One-time customers get ninety minutes from checkout to change anything they like.
The cutoff started at 9am and moved. "We found that was too short. They were still waking up." Ten o'clock is the number that fits how people actually behave in the morning, which is the only test that matters.
"That could be adding, removing products, changing fragrances, it could even be cancelling orders, or even adding things like discount codes and changing addresses."
- Customer subscribes or checks out on Shopify
- Order Editing self-serve window — subscribers until 10am on build day; one-time customers 90 minutes
- Customers change fragrance, add or remove products, cancel, fix the address, or apply a forgotten discount code
- Changes sync to Shopify; Recharge and fulfilment take the finalised order
Results the team is tracking
The number most case studies leave out
Every ROI figure in this library is a revenue figure. Upsell revenue over app cost, and the support savings quietly left out because they're harder to price.
AKT's is split in two.
9.6x is the financial return — the revenue Order Editing generated, measured against what AKT has actually spent on it.
5.1x is the operational return — the value of the support time that never got spent, measured against the same cost.
They stack. Order Editing returns AKT roughly 14.7 times its cost, and only two thirds of that shows up as revenue. The other third is the thing Aaron noticed first: a queue that got smaller while the business got bigger.
Why the 28% is bigger than it reads
It isn't 28% of edit tickets. It's 28% of everything.
Aaron measured current total support volume against what it was when AKT went live, over a period in which the business grew. A brand adding orders should be adding tickets. AKT's went down by more than a quarter, and the only thing that changed in that queue was that customers stopped needing permission to fix their own orders.
Isolating "edit tickets" would have produced a much larger and much less useful number. This one includes every ticket AKT received about anything.
Four storefronts, four different customers
AKT run the UK, US, EU and Australian stores on a single Order Editing plan. The per-market data is where it gets interesting.
| Storefront | Edit rate | Upsell revenue | Per edit |
|---|---|---|---|
| AKT London (UK) | 2.1% | £33,813 | £3.56 |
| AKT London US | 3.3% | £11,661 | £2.56 |
| AKT London AU | 5.4% | £5,887 | £10.36 |
| AKT London EU | 5.2% | £730 | £4.48 |
The edit rate runs backwards to the volume. The home market edits least, at 2.1%. Australia — the smallest live storefront by a distance — edits most, at 5.4%.
That's what you'd expect once you think about who's ordering. A UK customer receives their parcel in a day or two and has little reason to touch the order. A customer 10,000 miles away is looking at a longer shipping window, a higher-value basket and an address that has to be right the first time, because a failed delivery to Australia isn't a redelivery, it's a month.
Australia is also where the upsell lands hardest: 42% of edited orders there include an added product, against 18% in the UK, and £10.36 of upsell revenue per edit against £3.56. The same behaviour drives both. A customer who has already committed to a long shipping window has every reason to make one parcel do more work.
There's a merchandising lesson in that for any brand shipping internationally off a home market. The stores that look too small to bother configuring properly are the ones where the post-purchase window is worth the most per customer.
The upsell side
"We've been using the upsell feature at checkout and also post-purchase, and we're seeing around a 6% increase in that basket size overall, with customers adding items to their order."
Across the four storefronts, 2,504 products have been added to orders that were already placed — 17% of every edited order carries an add-on, and every edit is worth £3.52 in upsell revenue before the support saving is counted.
Three things follow from that for AKT specifically:
- The AOV increase goes straight to the brand. Not a pound of additional acquisition spend was required to produce it. These are customers already in the building.
- Order Editing is a flat monthly fee, not a revenue share. The upsell revenue isn't split.
- Which means net profit on those added products is materially higher than on an equivalent product sold to a new customer.
For a body care brand the add-on is usually another fragrance, a second format, or the thing the customer meant to put in the cart and didn't — offered at the moment they're already inside their own order, changing something else.
What the team does with the time back
"We're finding that customers are really enjoying using the app post-purchase. It allows them to manage their orders completely on their own, without having to contact support and have those long waiting times."
"It allows us to focus on those customers that do need that little bit more support, rather than those everyday, repetitive, mundane tasks that we were doing before."
The tasks that disappeared are the ones with no judgement in them. Nobody at AKT was applying expertise to a postcode correction.
How has working with the team been?
"From day one it's been a collaborative approach working with the team, especially Erin and Jack, all the way from onboarding to now. Their constantly proactive approach — allowing us to continue to look into how we can upsell, how we can continue to refine that customer journey from day one — has been absolutely astonishing."
One word for the team: proactive.
What AKT configured
- Subscription edit window with a 10am cutoff, aligned to the Recharge pull
- 90-minute self-serve window for one-time purchases
- Fragrance and variant swaps, add and remove products, cancellations
- Address edits before dispatch
- Discount code entry post-purchase
- Checkout and post-purchase upsells
- Live across four Shopify Plus storefronts — UK, US, EU and Australia — on a single plan
“My favourite thing about Order Editing is allowing customers to manage their own orders, and reducing our ticket volumes — especially for customer service.”
