GIVA grows global customer base by 193% with expansion stores

India is one of the largest markets in the world for gold jewelry, but the rising price of gold in recent years has prompted consumers to seek out more affordable alternatives. In 2019, inspired by the success of sterling silver in markets like the US, Ishendra Agarwal, Nikita Prasad, and Sachin Shetty created GIVA, pioneering the silver jewelry category in India.

GIVA quickly caught the attention of consumers across India and internationally. In just four years, GIVA has become one of the country’s fastest growing direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, expanding its footprint across India with 75 retail stores and raising an impressive US$33 million in its Series B funding round. Recognizing the need to support its growing customer base in India and around the world, the brand looked to Shopify Plus for its expansion stores, unlimited staff accounts, and higher application programming interface (API) rate limits.

With Shopify Plus, GIVA has seen:

The challenge

By 2021, GIVA was scaling rapidly and was in need of a more robust ecommerce system. The brand was capturing the attention of customers abroad and was looking to set up stores for audiences in the US and Sri Lanka, with messaging and prices tailored to those consumers. Additionally, surging customer traffic gave rise to the need for a more efficient inventory management back end, capable of handling multiple regions.

As GIVA’s customer base grew, so did its employee headcount. As such, it was becoming more laborious to handle permissions for the brand’s ecommerce platform, as well as to enable and disable users as they joined or left individual stores. The brand needed a way to seamlessly manage users at an organizational level.

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The solution

Having launched on Shopify from the get-go, the upgrade to Shopify Plus was a no-brainer for the GIVA team. By employing the expansion stores feature exclusive to Shopify Plus, which allows brands to set up new stores by importing as much (or as little) data from an existing store as they want, GIVA quickly set up new stores for the US and Sri Lanka. It also set up an expansion store for its offshoot brand, AVNI.

With four stores now running on Shopify and a fast-growing employee base, the Organization Settings functionality—only available on Shopify Plus—empowered GIVA to perform actions across multiple stores in the organization, instead of managing each store individually. The brand could now easily reactivate, suspend, or remove users in bulk and easily control store-level accesses and permissions.

Over time, GIVA built a number of internal systems on top of Shopify for maintaining inventory and products. The upgrade to Shopify Plus meant the brand could take advantage of the higher API rate limits on offer. Now with API rate limits of 500 points per second versus the 50 points per second available on the standard plan, GIVA could improve the performance of its platform, ensuring a proper sync between its internal systems and Shopify.

The results

The higher API rate limits have enabled the brand to maintain a real-time inventory view across both its online and retail stores. Now able to make 20 inventory changes a second versus the 4 per second on the standard plan, the brand has optimized its inventory management. Today the brand can push immediate updates to Shopify, regardless of whether it’s for a shipment arriving at a warehouse or at one of its 75 retail locations.

Meanwhile, with Shopify taking care of the back end, the new US store was up and running within a week, and the GIVA team could focus its time on setting up other processes and details like local pricing and messaging and navigating US customs requirements.