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Verdano Foods on working with Dazzle Commerce
An Australian food brand losing orders at the final step of checkout and fielding complaints about the ones it took. William Josh on the recommendation that sounded like a mistake.
WJ
Reviewed by William Josh
Operations Director, Verdano Foods
SECTOR
Food & Beverage
PLATFORM
BigCommerce
MARKET
Australia
ENGAGEMENT
Two quarters, ongoing
Chilled and ambient ranges, two very different delivery problems, and one checkout trying to cover both.
EXPERT VIEW
“We spent two years trying to get faster. We should have spent two weeks getting accurate. Quoting three days and hitting it beat quoting two and missing.”
William Josh · Operations Director, Verdano Foods
Published with the client’s approval following the engagement review. This line also appears on the Verdano Foods case study.
- Before the call
Why they went looking for an agency
A leaking checkout and a full support inbox, assumed to be two separate jobs.
“Checkout was losing people at the final step, and our support inbox was full of customers asking where their delivery was.”
We assumed those were two problems, and that the second one belonged to me. We had started as a chilled-only brand serving two metropolitan areas, where next-day delivery was straightforward and the promise was easy to keep. Then we added an ambient range and national coverage, and kept the promise.
By the time we called anyone, one delivery commitment was covering two product types with completely different logistics, shipping to postcodes from inner-city Sydney to regional Western Australia.
Abandonment concentrated at the final step, where shipping cost and delivery timing appeared for the first time.
- First
What they had already tried
Two years of solving a logistics problem with logistics.
“Two courier changes in eighteen months, and a faster chilled service into regional postcodes that cost more than the orders were worth.”
Every one of those felt obviously correct at the time. If the complaint is that delivery is late, you buy a faster delivery. It took somebody from outside to point out that nobody had actually complained about the speed.
- Onboarding
The first ninety days, from their side
Two datasets, laid over each other, describing the same customers.
Abandonment split by postcode band and product type, then matched against the complaint log line for line.
“They split checkout abandonment by postcode band and product type, then laid the complaint log over the top.”
Metropolitan ambient orders were fine. Chilled orders outside the metro corridors were where both problems lived, and they were the same orders. We had been looking at a conversion report and a support report and had never once put them side by side, because they belonged to different people.
The data needed to quote accurately was already in our carrier reports. It had simply never reached the product page.
- The finding
What surprised them
Being told to quote a longer delivery window.
“Every instinct said that would cost us conversion. It raised it.”
Customers outside the cities were not upset that delivery took four days. They were upset that we had promised two. Almost every delivery complaint in the log came from a postcode where the two-day promise had never been realistic, and the ones that converted best after the change were exactly those postcodes.
The average quoted delivery window on our store is longer now than it was before the engagement started. That sentence still makes our marketing team uncomfortable and it is the most profitable thing we did all year.
Regional postcodes where a two-day promise was never achievable — and where accuracy, not speed, was what converted.
- Outcome
What changed
Measured across two quarters against a pre-engagement baseline, with complaints counted per hundred orders rather than in absolute terms.
+41%
Conversion rate
Sessions to completed orders
-23%
Delivery complaints
Contacts per hundred orders
+19%
Average order value
Driven by the threshold redesign
8 wks
To payback
On the engagement fee
“The quoted delivery window got longer during this engagement, not shorter. Conversion still rose.”
- Their advice
What they would tell another brand considering us
Offered as advice to a peer rather than praise for us.
“Before you buy a new system, ask what is already sitting in the systems you have.”
The data that fixed this was in our carrier performance reports the whole time. We had spent two years and two courier contracts trying to buy our way out of a problem that needed a query and a template change.
- The criticism
What they would change
Every review on this site carries one of these. We publish them unedited.
“Telling the commercial team our delivery promise was about to get slower was not a comfortable meeting, and I ran it on my own.”
I had a slide deck I had been sent and an argument I had not built. The analysis was theirs and the case should have been theirs to present too. I would want the agency in that room next time — not to protect me, but because the people asking the hardest questions deserved answers from whoever did the work.
- In summary
Rated highest, rated lowest
No stars. Reviews of our own business, hosted on our own site, are not independent and we are not going to dress them up as though they were.
RATED HIGHEST
A recommendation that contradicted two years of internal strategy, with the evidence to carry it. They also found the answer in data we already owned rather than selling us something new.
RATED LOWEST
Leaving the internal argument to the client. If the agency builds the case, the agency should help present it to the people who have to live with it.
- The work behind this review
What actually ran on this account
Four service lines, one team, one plan. Each links to how we run that service generally.
The full methodology, the baseline, the sequencing and what we would do differently.
Moving cost and delivery timing forward in the journey — the change that mattered most here.
The estimate engine wiring carrier performance data into the storefront.
Shipping thresholds, carrier mix and the operating rhythm around both.
Post-purchase communication rebuilt around an estimate the business could actually keep.
The platform this ran on. No replatform was required, and none was proposed.
- More client stories
Other engagements, in their own words
Six reviews and six case studies, each pair covering the same engagement from opposite sides of the table.
CLIENT REVIEW
A US cookware brand whose revenue grew while profit stayed flat, and where the money was actually going.
CLIENT REVIEW
A UK supplements brand that came to us planning to cut acquisition spend, and finished the quarter raising it.
ALL REVIEWS
Every quote we publish, each sitting next to the work that produced it.
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