Case Study: Promoting an Online Store from RUB 0 to 2,000,000

Initial Situation

The niche was industrial equipment sales. This was the online store:

The idea was that products would be imported automatically from suppliers’ websites into the online store. This can be done on a Bitrix-based website. The client also wanted all products to be sent automatically to advertising platforms, which can be implemented through Yandex Direct and Google Merchant. Orders received through the store were supposed to be passed by the managers to suppliers, who would then ship the products directly from their own warehouses. If you are familiar with dropshipping, that is essentially the model — only with a high level of automation.

The idea was interesting, but in reality almost none of it worked. Most products were not imported correctly from suppliers’ websites. They were collected separately using specialised software, but many product listings ended up without photos, descriptions, or prices. Some cards were almost empty. On top of that, many prices were outdated, and some products had already been discontinued.

In short, the online store was not ready for promotion.

That was the starting point.

Starting the Work

To begin with, I launched a test advertising campaign for snow blowers. I did this in two steps:

1. I placed an advert on Avito.
2. We corrected the prices on the website, and I launched advertising on Google and Yandex.

Why snow blowers? Take a look at this search-demand chart.

I noticed a sharp increase in searches starting in December. This was data from the previous year, but demand patterns often repeat.

I also saw a high number of views on adverts for this product. All of this indicated that there was demand. The only thing left was to create the right offer.

We launched the advertising and calls started coming in, but there were no sales because customers wanted to inspect the product before buying it, which was perfectly reasonable. The company, however, was working through dropshipping and did not physically stock the products. The goods were stored at suppliers’ warehouses.

After roughly the twentieth phone call, I had to stop the campaign because the company simply could not sell the product in the way customers expected.

The next product I advertised was chillers. A chiller is something like an air conditioner, but much larger. It is used in ventilation and cooling systems for shopping centres and other large buildings, where ordinary domestic air conditioners are not sufficient. The function is similar, but the cost is completely different. This is what they look like:

This is not the kind of product people usually search for on Avito, so I ran advertising only on Yandex and Google.

The first order cost just RUB 196 in advertising spend.

The sale was made to a customer in Sochi. The equipment cost more than RUB 500,000, with a margin of around RUB 100,000. The same customer later ordered installation work and bought a significant amount of additional equipment as well. I do not know exactly how much the company earned from that customer in total, but I believe it was substantial.

I decided to maximise the traffic for this product category. To do that, we created a dedicated one-page website.

At first, the offer was “Turnkey chiller” because the company told me that the main customer pain point was that their target audience — chief engineers — did not want to deal with the equipment themselves. They wanted the entire job handled for them.

In reality, this kind of equipment is often purchased after a tender. The tender specification already contains the required chiller model. Purchasing is then handled by a procurement department whose task is simply to find that exact model at the lowest possible price. Their own financial interest is often tied to the price difference, so they want the cheapest available option.

Because of this, I changed the advertising offer to: “Any chiller at the lowest price.” As a result, orders started coming in almost every day. For industrial equipment with such high order values, daily orders are a very strong result.

I also started building a dedicated chiller online store. At the very top of each product page, the chiller model was displayed together with the phrase “at the lowest price”. For example: “LUC-SWH700 chiller at the lowest price”.

But that was not all. Unlike a standard online store, I added a section to each product page explaining why a customer should order from this particular company. The logic was simple: other companies sell the same equipment, so the page needed to give several reasons why the customer should buy here rather than elsewhere. This was my own approach, and it is something most online stores do not use. It was intended to look approximately like this:

This entire page was a product card. For each individual product, only the product name and description would change. The idea was that a potential customer would land on this page and see not only the standard product description found in other online stores, but also clear arguments for choosing this company. That was important because product descriptions and prices were more or less similar everywhere. The differentiating section was this:

At that point, problems arose with the supplier, and the company also did not have a dedicated salesperson for this type of equipment. We had to stop all advertising. The idea was therefore never fully implemented.

Later, I noticed that the season for ordinary domestic air conditioners was beginning.

I checked Avito and saw that air-conditioner adverts were receiving a lot of views in other cities as well. The weather forecast predicted an unusually hot summer in Ufa. I asked the company whether they would be able to handle air-conditioner sales, and they said yes. I first launched advertising on Avito. Once sales started coming in, I built a separate online store for air conditioners and launched campaigns in Yandex Direct, Yandex Market, and Google Ads. A separate store was necessary because the old website’s air-conditioner section was too disorganised.

This is how enquiries came in from Avito, not including phone calls and enquiries from the website.

The installation team became overloaded with work because there were so many orders.

As a result, around RUB 500,000 worth of air conditioners were sold in one month, plus approximately RUB 300,000 in installation services. These figures are approximate because the company did not have a proper order-tracking system in place.

I used essentially the same approach for water heaters. They did not have a strong seasonal peak, but they still sold well.

At that point, the business owner decided to implement call tracking so that he could see which advertising source generated each phone call. This required setting up a dynamic phone-number replacement system. He ended up dealing with this himself for around two months, communicating with Mango, ROISTAT, and other providers. There were various technical difficulties, and advertising was paused during that period.

Then the season for boilers began. For the same reasons as before, I created a separate online store for them. However, at that point the company won a tender and invested all available funds in the new project. As a result, there was no longer a need for online advertising, and our cooperation ended.

Results

To summarise, around RUB 130,000 was spent on advertising over the entire period. According to my calculations, sales were approximately RUB 2,000,000. As you can see, the figures are approximate, but I believe the overall result was very good.

Would you like to get strong results from online advertising? Contact me to set up your campaigns.