Building The Most Successful Shopping Season Yet

Tea Collection: A Customer Case Study

Tea Collection brings worldwide cultures and modern design to children's fashion. Twice each year they pack their bags, travel the globe, explore and discover, and then bring it all home in original designs that express the spirit of our adventures abroad. The name Tea named the company after the drink, because tea is shared in nearly every culture around the world. The company name Tea is about sharing discoveries and encouraging adventure.

For Tea Collection Black Friday is no longer a day – it is a week. For this stage of the 2014 holiday shopping season Tea Collection were planning a 25-30% year-over-year increase in sales. In terms of traffic, this was more than 50% increase. To achieve this, the e-commerce team prepared an extended campaign that spanned part of the week preceding Black Friday and covering beyond Cyber Monday as well. To make this kind of extended campaign a success Tea Collection needed a storefront that was not only available but also fast and responsive. Further – they needed the platform to continue running flawlessly on the back end – processing orders, tracking inventory, sales discounts and coupons, etc. It was just as important that the integrations with their 3PL, their ERP and other systems continued running without a glitch.

Having an existing relationship since 2009 really helped Upshot Commerce understand the customer need and support the demand. The focus was on understanding how from platform perspective we can streamline the process.

First Upshot Commerce helped by building a unique Holidays Traditions page. That helped expose the Tea story in a unique new way, while keeping visitors’ interest, and traffic and conversions up. A/B testing and overall traffic confirmed the page success.



Tea started early in the week with a private sale site – Tea Passport. This is another innovative approach developed and supported by Upshot Commerce. Tea Passport offered an invitation-only Private Preview Sale for fans of the brand. It was a hit.



Based on accurate forecasts for traffic increases Upshot Commerce was able to ensure adequate capacity with server spin-ups. This allowed the site to be up and available 100% of the time and to scale incredibly well. A significant difference on the back end was an overall decrease of the click-to-ship time – allowing Tea to speed up order execution when it was most needed.

With the launch of the Tea Collection Holidays Traditions page, the private sales site at Tea Passport and by ensuring availability, scalability and speed, Upshot Commerce contributed to the most successful holiday shopping season on record. Year-over-year sales were up more than 40% and well above the forecast. Conversion rate stayed incredibly high – in the 5% range. Number of orders and Average Order Value also increased. When stakes were high Upshot Commerce delivered again and supported another landmark performance.

Upshot Commerce provides a comprehensive platform with robust, enterprise-ready features and best practices for Direct-To-Consumer and B2B e-commerce. Our solutions come standard with tools to control, manage and automate inventory, order management, fulfillment and warehousing, customer information, analytics, SEO, product information, merchandising and faceted navigation, and more. These components come as an integral part of the platform, while with other vendors, they often are through third party providers and with extra cost and headaches. Our platform also integrates exceptionally well with ERPs and 3PLs and contains a rich Restful API to provide a seamless, automated workflow for your enterprise.

Upshot Commerce has been in business for 20 years, with hundreds of clients, millions of transactions per month, over a billion in sales processed. A key aspect that sets us apart is how we approach each customer as a partner. The results speak for themselves: When the average online retailer changes platforms every 4 years, our average customer has been with us 7 and a half years and some as long as 18.