Scaling a global online fashion marketplace with data at the center.

LAAM is an e-commerce marketplace that helps buyers across the globe discover and purchase South Asian fashion. They serve customers in over 8,500 cities across 200 countries with over 3 million monthly active users (MAUs). Managing this scale and diversity in the user base poses analytical challenges; it can be especially tricky to slice and dice metrics to understand user behavior, identify opportunities, and prioritize ideas for growth.

Ahmed Muneeb, Co-founder and CTO, recognized early on in the company’s journey that success hinged on achieving several incremental improvements. They needed to test various aspects of their business and iterate rapidly to meet user demands.

Explaining the importance of how data-driven insights shape their product, Ahmed said, “Data plays a crucial role in every decision we take at LAAM. Everything from changing the color or position of a button to shaping the product roadmap is based on data.”

Building and scaling a data-driven culture from the ground up

LAAM prioritized investing in tooling at an early stage to foster a data-driven culture throughout the company. They understood that shipping the right features would have a compounding effect on growth metrics over time.

Ahmed wanted to empower his Engineering and Product teams to build quickly and with confidence. Their aim was to:

• Gain visibility into customer usage by logging events of interest.
• Create a democratized, centralized source of truth that everyone in the organization can use to visualize metrics and identify growth opportunities.
• Bring data into the decision-making process at every stage of the product development journey.
• Evaluate ideas with A/B tests to understand the impact of features on core metrics.

Kickstarting the growth journey with analytics

The first step for LAAM was to establish a baseline for metrics and encourage everyone to track progress using dashboards. LAAM initiated this journey by defining core metrics, such as click-through and purchase conversion rates. They employed Statsig SDKs to begin logging events and developing a trusted library of metrics.

“Statsig has become the go-to source of truth in our company. Whenever we need to visualize a data point, we simply use Statsig to create a dashboard,” Ahmed shared. He highlighted how this culture allowed teams to identify areas of lesser visibility and begin logging metrics to bridge these gaps.

“Visualizing data helps us see what’s missing. With Statsig, it’s easy to log the required data point and start analyzing it,” he explained.

With Statsig, LAAM ensured data was made accessible across the company, removing dependencies and obstacles to making informed, swift decisions.

“Everyone has access to Statsig’s dashboards. Non-technical stakeholders like Marketing, Growth and Business Strategy teams are able to build dashboards on their own and aren’t dependant on the Data Analytics team.”

“If we need to understand what happened on a specific day, we can simply access the Statsig console and find out in just a few clicks.”

Having a robust framework for metrics enabled Ahmed’s team to gain a deeper understanding of their users. “We’ve processed over a billion events in the past year and gained amazing insights about our users using Statsig’s analytics.”

“Statsig has become the go-to source of truth in our company. Whenever we need to visualize a data point, we simply use Statsig to create a dashboard.”

Ahmed Muneeb

Co-founder & CTO

Developing the experimentation mindset for feature rollouts

The next step for LAAM was to begin testing ideas to improve these metrics. They utilized funnels, user journeys, and retention charts to identify low-hanging fruit and started building features to enhance the various workflows within their product.

“Our key business decisions, such as implementing an express shipping option, designing the homepage feed, and developing algorithms like recommendations, have all been guided by Statsig’s powerful analytics and A/B testing.

Notable use cases and impact

By continuous testing and iterations, LAAM was able to increase their conversion rate by 75% over time. This resulted from several incremental improvements and wins such as:

1. Improving the checkout journey through A/B testing funnels

Ahmed detailed their use of Statsig’s funnels to track user progression throughout the checkout journey and the ease of running A/B tests for different options.

“Statsig’s funnel analysis combined with integrated A/B testing has been very powerful for helping us ensure a smooth and swift checkout experience.”

“We moved from a 5-step to a single step checkout for logged in users and a 2-step checkout for logged out users. We can easily analyze funnels to understand drop-off rates between steps and then test options by running A/B tests on Statsig.”

This approach enabled LAAM to identify unexpected metric regressions – allowing them to ship only the winning variants. Ahmed also noted the tool’s impact on debugging events. “Statsig’s analytics has helped us diagnose errors related to metrics like add_to_cart. In fact, our Customer Success team has utilized Statsig to determine whether a complaint reflects a wider scale issue.”

2. Launching the ‘Wishlist’ feature:

Statsig played a crucial role in LAAM’s launch of key product-led growth (PLG) features, such as wishlists. They leveraged User Journeys, Funnels and Retention charts to gain a deep understanding of how users navigated new features.

“When we launched the ‘wishlist’ feature, we gained deep insights into user engagement with wishlists—how many products were added, how many were then added to the cart from wishlists, and how many resulted in new users.”

Ahmed also highlighted the value proposition of having analytics tightly integrated with their experimentation process. “We can easily monitor user behavior throughout an experiment and use the ‘Group by Experiment’ filter to understand how a metric is performing for a given feature.”

3. Fine-tuning ranking algorithms

“We use Statsig to continuously understand product trends and how they are influenced by seasonality,” Ahmed shared. Such insights enabled LAAM to make pivotal decisions for optimizing the homepage design and listing page rankings throughout the year. “Our filters on the listing page are dynamically ranked using events and analytics from Statsig”

“We conducted 56 experiments on our ranking to optimize conversions. Anyone can suggest a ranking function, and we’ll conduct an A/B test to validate it.”

“Statsig allows us to continuously measure the conversion rate and stickiness of product listings, facilitating ongoing enhancements. These iterations ultimately led to a 75% increase in conversions.”

4. Optimizing the shipping cost for specific regions

LAAM’s use of Statsig extended beyond mere UI-level modifications. They tested key business decisions, such as shipping costs to identify the most effective strategy for different regions.

“We analyze data and then conduct experiments to determine the optimal shipping costs for specific regions by collaborating with various vendors. We then track changes in the number of orders on Statsig.”

The impact was substantial. “By optimizing shipping prices in North America and the Middle East, we achieved a 10x increase in growth.”

Building with confidence and maximizing their impact with Statsig

“Our approach has been to use analytics to figure out what is happening and then solve that problem with experimentation.”

“We haven't shipped a single feature in the last 1.5 years without leveraging data and A/B testing on Statsig. If you see any feature live on LAAM, it has been tested and optimized using Statsig.”

Ahmed Muneeb

Co-founder & CTO