Valentte x FERO
Turning checkout into a revenue engine: £6–7M annual revenue gain and ~2% higher AOV.
“The results were sensational.They outperformed our existing checkout by an order of magnitude, translating into millions of pounds in additional revenue every year.”
Meet Valentte
Valentte is a premium skincare and wellness brand operating on WooCommerce, investing heavily in paid acquisition across Meta and Google to drive customers to their store. With a sophisticated e-commerce setup and high customer acquisition costs, every lost sale at checkout carried a real and measurable price.
The Challenge
Valentte was spending millions annually on paid media to bring shoppers to their store, only to watch a significant portion abandon at the final step. The team knew checkout was underperforming, but the opacity of the problem made it hard to fix. Declined transactions were happening at a rate they could not explain, and the WooCommerce checkout offered none of the polish or optimisation they could see on competing platforms.
"Losing people during checkout is costing us money. We are spending millions a year on Meta ads, and each one of those customers is very expensive to acquire. If we get them all the way through the sales process and then they fail at checkout or abandon, it's really depressing. It's also a waste of money."
The core frustration was not just the lost revenue. It was the lack of visibility. Without a clear picture of what was and was not working inside checkout, Valentte could not make informed decisions or iterate with confidence. WooCommerce, for all its flexibility, left the team navigating a fragmented landscape of plugins that conflicted with one another and made checkout brittle and hard to trust.
"Checkout in WordPress is notoriously bad. It's not optimised in any meaningful way, and it breaks all the time. The different payment processors, all the different plugins that get activated, they all interact with each other and it's so easy to damage checkout."
The Experiment
Valentte implemented FERO Smart Checkout on their WooCommerce store and ran a structured A/B test to measure the impact against their existing checkout. The integration also involved a move to a new payment processor, Adyen, whose deeper connection with FERO contributed to stronger transaction approval rates. FERO's team handled the technical onboarding directly, with Luke's lead developer later describing it as the best remote integration experience across more than fifty SaaS products the team had ever worked with. When a connection issue arose during the test period involving a link to Valentte's Meta account, FERO's team resolved it over a weekend, including on a Sunday, to keep the experiment running cleanly.
"FERO’s development team was head and shoulders the best out of all the integrations, every single piece of software we've integrated into our platform. The most helpful, the most on it, and the most effective." - Luke Breams
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
The A/B test delivered a 28.06% uplift in checkout conversion, translating to what Luke estimated as six to seven million pounds in additional annual revenue. Average order value also rose by 2%. Express checkout, surfaced through FERO, was adopted quickly, with 29% of all orders in the first week completing via that route as customers chose to convert on the spot rather than continuing through a longer flow.
“The results were sensational. They were so much better than our existing checkout had delivered. An order of magnitude better. It equated to many millions of pounds a year in extra revenue for us.”
Why It Worked
Luke attributed the uplift to two reinforcing factors. First, a genuine UX improvement: the layout, architecture, and flow of FERO Smart Checkout gave customers a cleaner, more confident path to purchase. Second, the switch to Adyen as the payment processor, tightly integrated with FERO, drove a meaningful improvement in transaction acceptance rates, directly reducing the declined transactions that had puzzled the team for months.
The express checkout option removed friction for customers ready to commit, letting them pay in moments via Apple Pay or Google Pay without navigating a full checkout page.
