How Brimston Uses ChatRef to Boost Sales 35% and Cut Support Costs

Overview

Brimston, a mid-sized online sneaker store known for plant-based rubber soles, faced rising support costs and lost sales from abandoned carts. With one million monthly visitors and a lean ten-person support crew, the team struggled to keep up with questions about sizes, shipping, and returns. After adding ChatRef’s e-commerce chatbot, Brimston now recovers $120k in carts each month, raises conversions thirty-five percent, and cuts ticket volume by eighty percent.

The Challenge

Cart abandonment hovered near seventy percent, and support wait times stretched past four hours on busy weekends. Shoppers left without buying when they could not find size advice, shipment tracking, or quick answers. Seasonal surges during Black Friday and holiday drops froze the site’s live chat queue, costing thousands in lost orders. The small team also juggled emails, Instagram DMs, and WhatsApp pings, making it hard to keep answers consistent. Brimston needed a single tool that could speak five languages, guide customers to the right shoe, and scale instantly without hiring more agents or blowing the budget.

The Solution

Brimston chose ChatRef after a two-week pilot showed instant wins. The chatbot plugs into their Shopify store, syncs stock levels in real time, and sends smart reminders when a cart sits idle. Built-in language packs greet shoppers in English, Spanish, French, German, and Japanese. Training was simple: the team uploaded FAQs, sizing charts, and past transcripts. Within fifteen days the bot went live on the website and WhatsApp, answering price, fit, and return questions while handing tricky cases to humans.

Implementation & Key Benefits

Benefit #1: Cart Recovery at Scale ChatRef emails and messages shoppers thirty minutes after they leave. Twenty-eight percent of those carts now complete checkout, adding about one hundred twenty thousand dollars in monthly revenue.

Benefit #2: 24/7 Multilingual Support The bot answers in under two seconds, day or night, in five languages. It resolves eighty percent of questions without an agent, lifting customer happiness to ninety-four percent and slashing support cost per ticket by sixty-five percent.

Benefit #3: Peak Season Performance During Black Friday traffic spikes, ChatRef handled five times the usual chat load while keeping response times under three seconds. Conversion rates climbed eighteen percent, and order-tracking updates cut “Where is my order?” tickets by seventy percent.

Results & ROI

Sales rose thirty-five percent, and abandoned-cart recovery adds six figures every month. Automating routine questions saves forty-five thousand dollars in staffing costs monthly, paying back ChatRef’s fee in just six weeks. “ChatRef paid for itself in the first month,” says Maya Lee, Brimston’s Head of E-commerce. “We now give faster answers and close more sales without burning out our team.”

Key Takeaways

Brimston shows that even a lean shoe brand can use AI chatbots to boost sales, rescue carts, and delight shoppers—without growing headcount. ChatRef’s fast setup and multi-channel skills make customer support automation easy for any online retailer ready to scale smart.