Personalization Audit: Cupshe

Swimwear brand Cupshe has made a big splash on Shopify and beyond with their lineup of affordable and trendy swimsuits, coverups, and more. Today we're taking a closer look at whether Cupshe is making a splash when it comes to personalization, or just ending up all wet.

Cupshe personalization strategy audit

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Compared to a lot of other brands we've covered in our audits - like ModCloth or Alo Yoga - Cupshe is a little newer. The brand's rapid success is owed to the opportunity they seized back in 2015: To create affordable swimsuits at a fraction of the cost most other brands were producing items at, essentially transforming swimwear into the same fast fashion model that has proven wildly successful in other categories.  

Although Cupshe has a large distribution channel through Amazon, they've also branched out to sell their full lineup direct to consumers on their Shopify website, including dresses, coverups, and accessories to live your best life under the sun. Racking up over $100M in annual sales, Cupshe has firmly established itself as the biggest swimsuit brand on Shopify.

In some ways, the Cupshe personalization experience should follow suit with how activewear sites should model things: Selling matching sets and boosting AOV by highlighting ancillary products or curating head to toe looks.  

There's one other nuance of swimsuit shopping that Cupshe could tap into, and that is coverage. Generally speaking most women have a very specific leverage of coverage or style of swimsuit they're looking for - from itty bitty bare-it-all bikinis to more modest one-piece picks.

What Cupshe got right

• Recently viewed: Sometimes the simplest strategies are the best. Cupshe uses a 'Recently viewed' block throughout their site, including on product detail pages, the cart page, and collection pages. They could go further by including it on the search page, as well as on the home page, to help returning shoppers easily get back to products they showed interest in.

Areas for Cupshe to enhance

• Product detail page (PDP) cross-selling: What goes great with a bikini bottom? A matching top of course, and Cupshe does a good job on most PDPs of making sure you find different tops and bottoms for their modular sets with 'Buy it with' or 'Mix and match' cross-sell boxes. Some pages there's no cross-sell at all, which feels like a missed opportunity. When selling a one-piece or bikini set, however, the cross-sells are a bit less effective (do customers really need two swimsuits at once?) Cupshe could test out cross-selling items from their accessories and coverups collections instead of other swimsuits on pages where a cross-sell to another swimsuit piece isn't as obvious.
  
  Bonus points to Cupshe for including 'You may also like' recommendations to help customers find similar styles to what they're viewing, and stacking recommendation blocks on top of each other on the product detail pages.
  
  

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  But looking at the cross-sells on non-swimsuit pages brings up a range of different experiences. On dress pages, the same 'Buy it with' block appears with a mix of dresses and swimsuits. On footwear pages like the one above, a single cross-sell is presented below the hero image, and features another pair of shoes. Still others have nothing at all. While product detail pages don't have to be universally consistent with how they present recommendations, it does seem like there's some room to solidify a strategy here, potentially by curating bundles or at least cross-selling products from different collections.

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Missed personalization opportunities for

Cupshe

• Cart and checkout cross-sells: Cupshe doesn't provide any cross-sells in their slideout Ajax cart, on the shopping bag page, or at checkout. They should leverage their 'matching set' strategy on the product detail pages through cart and checkout to drive higher AOV.
• Customer personalization: Almost nothing on the Cupshe site reflects an individual shopper's behaviors, other than the 'You may like' recommendations referenced above. Cupshe could rearrange their collection sort order, highlight a featured collection on the home page, and change the 'recommended for you' section on the home page to actually spotlight items that reflect a customer's preferences - for example, between one-piece or two-piece swimsuits.
• Bundles: While Cupshe makes it easy on most bikini pages to browse mix and match bottoms, they could simplify the shopping experience even more by curating bundles that allow you to add an entire look with a single click. This would be an easy way for Cupshe to promote their dresses, coverups, and accessories while keeping shoppers from getting overwhelmed with choice as they browse these other collections (or worse, skip exploring them altogether).
• Social proof and loyalty program recommendations: Cupshe has a decent number of reviews for their products. They could integrate star ratings from their reviews' provider to highlight which products are not only recommended for a shopper, but which ones are most-loved. The same goes for integrating their Sunchasers loyalty program. Cupshe could promote the loyalty points a customer could get for buying certain suits right in their recommendation boxes, and even offer bonus points on specific items to further drive conversions.

Conclusion

Cupshe is missing some easy wins to boost their AOV. Specifically, they could be driving more eyeballs across their entire product line and building a reputation beyond being a leading swimwear brand. A more consistent cross-sell and bundling strategy could easily boost basket sizes for the brand, and eventually they could move into more advanced techniques like tailoring the site based on a shopper's preferred style or even their preferred collection (i.e. dresses vs. swimwear vs. coverups).

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