Summary
How a customer service shift turned into a B2B revenue engine: I spotted schools and training programs placing 2–3x larger orders, then built a low-tech Shopify MVP that raised AOV 20% and is still running today.
20%
AOV increase in year one
30%
growth in .edu and .org traffic
2022
built, and still running today
The Opportunity
Under staffing constraints one grad season, it was all hands on deck. It wasn't glamorous work, but I started using it as a listening post, every call and customer ticket was a customer telling me something about how they actually shopped.
A pattern showed up fast. We were getting orders from schools and corporate training programs/workshops. Institutional buyers running multi-location operations with thousands of students graduating every year. Their orders were already 2x to 3x larger than our typical retail customer’s orders, but we were serving them like one-off shoppers. No dedicated experience, no streamlined process, no incentive for them to come back.
Basically, we were sitting on a higher-AOV segment we weren't designed to serve.
The Process
I sized the opportunity first using AOV data we already had and the data proved to me that any effort we make towards capturing this segment would be worth it. These customers were already buying from us, so building anything to make their process smoother and scalable would only benefit us, so I started building.
Rather than wait for engineering resources, I built the whole thing as a low-tech MVP myself in the form of a dedicated Shopify landing page for institutional buyers.
The landing page included a qualification form that asked the right questions upfront.
Custom product pages were generated from each submission using a Shopify page template I built to streamline the process. I made them so schools could link directly to their students from .org and .edu sites
Discount codes for their students, plus an upsell path: custom in-house grad gifts produced on demand. No inventory risk for the school.
A seasonal lifecycle: at the end of each graduation cycle, we'd turn off purchasing. The next season, schools were prompted to update their offerings or call us to turn it back on. This kept them coming back instead of treating us as a one-time vendor.
I proved the demand on existing tools first, so any future engineering investment would be backed by real results.
The result
In its first year, the program raised AOV by 20% and grew traffic from .edu and .org sites by 30%. The benefits reached beyond the institutional side, too: the customer data we gathered fed look-alike audiences in Google Ads, lifting performance on the consumer side, and the inbound links from school websites gave our organic search a boost. The program is still running today, nearly two years after I left the company.
What I learned
The biggest products don't always come from a roadmap meeting. Sometimes they come from doing the unglamorous work and actually listening. I wasn't looking for a B2B opportunity when I started covering CS tickets, but the customers were already telling me one existed.
I also learned that low-tech systems can outlast their builder. I didn't have engineering resources, so I designed the workflow to run on tools we already had and to require minimal hand-holding. That’s why it’s still operating without me: I built it on tools the team already knew, so it never depended on one person to keep it running.