Case Study · E-Commerce · UK · Wine, Spirits & Gourmet

Lusorra — a store taken from four and a half seconds to 442 milliseconds

A UK direct-to-consumer store selling Moldovan and Caucasian wine, spirits, caviar and gourmet food. Built, instrumented and run by Sagorra — including the parts nobody puts in a case study, like the 1,983 search terms it had to stop paying for.

WooCommerceGoogle ShoppingMeta AdsOmnisendGA4 + GTMRank Math SEOAge Verification
442ms
Load Time, From ~4.5s
1,983
Negative Keywords Added
40
Products, SEO Complete
3
Channels Live

How to read this page

There are no return-on-spend figures below. A ROAS number without the account, the period and the attribution model behind it is not evidence, and we would rather show you the account than print a number about it.

What is below is work: things that were built, changed or removed, each of which you can verify on the live store or in an account we can open in front of you.

The brief

Moldova makes very good wine and almost nobody in the UK knows it. That is the whole commercial thesis: a category with real quality, real scarcity and no established demand, which means every channel has to do explaining as well as selling.

Alcohol makes it harder. Age verification is not optional, Merchant Center will not accept an alcohol feed without the right configuration, and a single miscategorised product can take a Shopping campaign off air without anyone being told.

So the job was never just traffic. It was to build a store that loads fast enough to be seen, a feed that stays approved, a search account that stops paying for the wrong intent, and a content layer that teaches the category to people who have never bought from it.

At a glance

SectorPremium food & drink, D2C
PlatformWooCommerce on SiteGround
Catalogue40 SKUs across four categories
ChannelsGoogle Shopping, Meta, email
ConstraintUK alcohol advertising rules

What we built

Each of these is checkable — on the store, in the feed, or in the account.

The approach

Three decisions, in the order they mattered.

01

Speed First, Because Nothing Else Counts

Every optimisation downstream of page load is worth less than page load. A store that takes four and a half seconds on mobile is not converting badly — it is not being seen.

02

Subtract Before You Add

The first meaningful change to the Shopping account was removing searches, not adding budget. Almost two thousand of them.

03

Teach The Category

Nobody searches for a producer they have never heard of. They search for what divin is. The editorial layer exists to be the answer, and to carry the product alongside it.

What runs now

The store is live and operating on three channels: Google Shopping, a Meta conversion campaign optimising on Purchase, and email through Omnisend. The catalogue is fully indexed, the feed is approved, and the editorial layer is being extended on a fixed cadence.

Lusorra is also the proving ground for the automation work — it is one of the three brands the publishing agent posts for, under a written charter, with every decision logged. That is described on the autonomous systems page.

Ready to Scale

Want results like these for your store?

Lusorra is a live account, not a borrowed case study. If you're running a UK e-commerce brand and your current agency isn't delivering, the same stack applies.

Or write directly — office@sagorra.co.uk