Where craft meets conversion: Round Wood’s nature-led brand achieves a 32.7% checkout lift with FERO
When your products are shaped by decades of timber craft, your checkout should feel just as dependable. Round Wood partnered with FERO to remove friction and turn more shoppers into buyers.
“FERO has felt like an extension of our team, and seeing a 32.7% lift in conversions confirmed we chose the right partner.”
Meet Round Wood of Mayfield
For more than three decades, Round Wood of Mayfield has worked at the intersection of craft and nature. What began as a small timber operation has grown into a respected brand offering bespoke timber products and premium garden features, all created from their woodland-surrounded base in East Sussex.
When legacy evolves into modern eCommerce leadership
Round Wood of Mayfield’s story began in forestry, expanded into timber and oak frame buildings, and later added garden features like pots, planters, and outdoor décor. After years operating as three separate divisions, the company unified under one brand to offer customers a complete garden solution and to accelerate cross-selling across product lines.
But as the brand grew, so did the need for a more sophisticated digital experience. Despite strong demand and several record months online, Round Wood’s team recognized that high-value and customizable products weren’t converting well through traditional checkout flows. Much of their website still functioned primarily as lead-generation rather than true e-commerce.
For a business with both complex products and high order values, checkout UX became mission-critical.
Choosing FERO over a custom-built WooCommerce Checkout
At first, Round Wood planned to have their developer build a new WooCommerce checkout as part of their upcoming site relaunch. But everything shifted after their conversation with FERO.
Lucy explained that they hadn’t realised specialised checkout companies even existed, and once they saw FERO in action, the difference was immediate. FERO offered expertise far beyond what a generalist developer could provide, with ongoing improvements that would continue long after launch.
Lucy described it simply:
“It’s always beneficial to work with specialists. There are so many moving parts, and one developer can’t know it all.”
How Round Wood validated a 32.7% lift with FERO Smart Checkout
Round Wood chose to validate FERO through a full A/B test, splitting traffic between their native WooCommerce checkout and the FERO Smart Checkout to see which one truly performed better.
The experiment gave them complete clarity, removing risk and providing hard data to guide their decision. By running both checkouts side by side, they were able to measure the impact objectively and confirm that FERO delivered a significantly higher conversion rate.
The results arrived quickly and decisively, giving the team confidence to move forward and reinforcing that choosing a specialist solution was the right step for their growing ecommerce channel.
Lucy highlighted how valuable this approach was, noting how quickly FERO responded during the rollout:
“We’re used to systems that take days to reply. Having you respond instantly has been amazing for us.”
The uplift confirmed what the team suspected: choosing a specialist was not just a technical upgrade, but a strategic one.
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.
Looking beyond optimisation
With all traffic now routed through FERO, Round Wood has moved from testing into full momentum. Every shopper experiences a smoother, faster checkout, and every interaction helps fuel smarter optimisation across their growing ecommerce business.
Looking ahead, both teams are aligned on the next wave of innovation. FERO’s upcoming AI-driven checkout capabilities and machine-learning shipping optimisation are already on Round Wood’s radar. Lucy and her team are eager to stay ahead of technology shifts and adopt features that reduce friction even further.
This is no longer just a checkout upgrade. It’s the start of an ongoing partnership built on shared innovation, continuous growth, and a commitment to crafting an online experience as dependable as Round Wood’s products themselves.
