Engravers Guild of London x FERO
How a century-old craft business unlocked a 10% checkout conversion uplift in just 10 days.
“When FERO set out what that 10% uplift could translate to across an entire year, you get some quite big numbers. It felt like a no-brainer.”
Meet Engravers Guild
Engravers Guild is a UK-based personalised gifts business with over a hundred years of manufacturing heritage rooted in Birmingham's jewellery quarter. Founded by Elliot after salvaging the family's engraving machines when the factory closed in 2009, the business grew from six pairs of cufflinks sold from a dining room table into a fully-fledged e-commerce operation built on WooCommerce.
The Challenge
Selling highly personalised, handcrafted products online is no small feat. Building a website capable of handling the complexity of customisation took Engravers Guild two full years and no shortage of stumbling blocks. By the time the store was live and performing, the team had earned a healthy level of scepticism toward new tech solutions, having been burned before by integrations that promised the world and delivered very little.
Elliot was receiving up to six sales pitches a day and had developed a deliberate filter: unless something made an immediate, undeniable case for itself, it was dismissed. Checkout optimisation, in particular, felt like a stretch for a personalised gifts merchant. As Elliot put it, customers buying a gift for someone else are unlikely to respond to an upsell in the same way a repeat buyer might.
“I've been burned so many times investing my effort and resource into trying to integrate a new service that somebody tells me is absolutely brilliant and it does absolutely nothing whatsoever. So I now approach it from a very high level of scepticism.”
The Experiment
When Engravers Guild decided to trial FERO Smart Checkout, the decision came down to three things: there was no upfront cost, setup was straightforward, and the A/B test would deliver a conclusive answer within 10 days. For a founder used to being let down by over-promised integrations, that combination removed almost every reason to say no.
“It cost us no money to set up. It did seem pretty easy to set up, and there's a defined A/B test which is pretty conclusive. You could tell within 10 days. That's what got us over the line.”
FERO was integrated into the existing WooCommerce checkout and the test ran. No lengthy onboarding, no disruption to the store, no leap of faith required.
An adaptive checkout engine that uses predictive AI to automatically adjust, showing the right design, layout, or payment option based on the shopper's behaviour. It integrates easily with ecommerce platforms and can be deployed in under 10 minutes.
The Results
Within 10 days, the A/B test returned a 10% uplift in checkout conversion rate. For a merchant that already had a strong baseline conversion rate on the checkout page, adding meaningful percentage points on top of that is significant. The real impact became clear when the numbers were projected across a full year.
“It was good just to have a sense of how your checkout performs anyway, because it's not something we've ever looked at. We were encouraged by the results. When you get some quite big numbers projected across an entire year, it felt like a no-brainer.”
Why It Worked
Elliot is candid that the checkout UI at Engravers Guild was already clean and functional before FERO, so he doesn't attribute the uplift to visual changes alone. The more likely driver is FERO's smart features: behavioural targeting that segments shoppers by intent, payment method optimisation, and trust-building signals delivered at the right moment in the checkout journey. For Engravers Guild, those intelligent, behind-the-scenes optimisations appear to have made the difference.
Looking ahead, FERO's Smart Basket Suggestion feature, which uses predictive product recommendations to increase average order value at checkout, is a natural next step for a merchant with such a deep and personalised product catalogue.
More Than Just Performance
Beyond the conversion data, Elliot highlighted something that tends to matter as much as the product itself: support.Engravers Guild communicates with the FERO team via a dedicated Slack channel, and the responsiveness has been a clear differentiator.
“Every time we got in touch with FERO, there was somebody responding pretty much all hours within two minutes. That was quite impressive.”
For a lean e-commerce team managing a complex, high-customisation product catalogue, knowing that expert support is available quickly isn't a nice-to-have. It's what turns a tool into a trusted partner.
