How Ripped Up Nutrition reduced RTO from 20% to 2%

+32%

Increase in AOV

18%

Decrease in RTO

Meet the brand

Founded in 2017, Ripped Up Nutrition is a performance-focused health supplement brand built for serious fitness enthusiasts. Based out of Baddi, Himachal Pradesh, the company operates its own manufacturing unit giving the team full control over product quality, consistency, and formulation.

Meet the brand

Challenge

Most eCommerce brands donʼt fail because they canʼt sell. They fail because of RTO andblocked cash flow. Fix your checkout first.”

— Himanshu Verma, Founder, Ripped Up Nutrition

When you sell supplements, trust isn’t optional, it’s everything.

Ripped Up Nutrition quickly realized this. Early batches manufactured by third parties had inconsistent taste and quality. In a category where customers literally consume your product, that’s a growth killer.

So before scaling marketing, they did something bold: they set up their own manufacturing unit in Baddi, Himachal Pradesh. The website launched in 2018 but operational control was only the first battle.

The real struggle came at checkout. The checkout was draining cash flow. Like many D2C brands, Ripped Up Nutrition relied on native Shopify checkout. But as they scaled, the cracks became obvious.

The limitations:

No OTP-based verification
No partial COD option
No payment-method nudges (like UPI/prepaid incentives)
High fake COD orders
RTO rates at 20%

At the time:

70% of orders were COD
Courier partners held COD funds for 7–15 days post-delivery

For a bootstrapped brand, that’s a cash-flow chokehold.

Himanshu explains:

“Most eCommerce brands don’t fail because they can’t sell. They fail because of RTO and blocked cash flow. When 70% of your orders are COD and returns are high, growth becomes stressful.”

High fake orders. High reverse logistics costs. Delayed remittances.

Marketing could bring demand but checkout friction was eroding profitability. For a scaling supplement brand, that’s not sustainable.

And that’s where the real transformation began.

Evaluation Criteria

Shopify’s top-tier plan that could offer some of these features was too expensive to justify at their stage(of being a bootstrapped company), so they needed a solution that delivered these capabilities without forcing a massive platform upgrade.
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User Interface

Before even diving deep into features, Himanshu compared how the checkout experience felt.

He had evaluated other aggregators, but the UI mattered.

“Shopflo is more like an app-type UI. Other options felt basic. I personally liked the user interface more.”

– Himanshu Verma, Founder, Ripped Up Nutrition

For him, this meant:

A smoother flow
Better cart experience
More control over how offers and upsells appear

In D2C, especially supplements, trust and clarity at checkout impact conversion. A clunky or rigid interface wasn’t acceptable.

Cart-Level Functionality & Upsells

Another deciding factor was control at the cart stage.

Himanshu specifically mentioned:

Applying discounts on the cart page
Upselling inside the cart
Better cart functionality overall

“They had cart functionality, upsell inside the cart, and apply discount on the cart page. That flexibility was important.”

– Himanshu Verma, Founder, Ripped Up Nutrition

Payment-Method-Based Discounts

Native Shopify checkout didn’t allow them to incentivize specific payment methods like UPI.

“If we promote more UPI payments, the remittance commissions are lower. But native checkout doesn’t allow payment-method-based discounts.”

– Himanshu Verma, Founder, Ripped Up Nutrition

For a bootstrapped brand, increasing prepaid share, reducing gateway commissions, and protecting margins directly impact survival, which is why they needed a checkout that could actively nudge customer behavior, not just process payments.

Solution & strategies

Once the evaluation was clear, Ripped Up Nutrition implemented Shopflo not as a plug-in, but as a strategic shift. What changed wasn’t just the interface. It was the economics of the business

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Partial COD: The 10% commitment that changed everything

“If a customer is ordering ₹5,000, asking for ₹500 upfront is not a big risk for them. But it shows intent.”

– Himanshu Verma, Founder, Ripped Up Nutrition

Instead of offering 100% COD, they introduced 10% upfront payment on COD orders.

This wasn’t about restricting customers it was about validating intent, that 10% upfront amount filters out people who are not serious. Someone who is casually ordering won’t pay even a small advance.

That small behavioral shift created massive downstream impact:

Prepaid orders increased from 30% to 90%
RTO dropped from 20% to 1–2%
Remaining RTOs are mostly genuine cases (damaged product or undeliverable areas)

Today they don’t offer 100% COD , only prepaid and partial COD.

When asked how such a dramatic prepaid shift happened, Himanshu was direct:

“That is only 100% possible with Shopflo.”

For a bootstrapped brand, this wasn’t just operational improvement. It stabilised cash flow.

Upsells improved AOV

Instead of reducing prices on the product page (which impacts brand perception and margin structure), they offered a special discounted price only at the cart stage.

Himanshu explained it clearly:

“If a product is listed for ₹1000, on the product page it shows ₹1000. But in the cart as upsell we can offer it for ₹900.”

That difference matters.

One clear example was marine collagen, which scaled significantly through cart-based discounted upsells and became a Top 3 SKU.

Discounting on the product page reduces perceived value. Discounting inside the cart increases perceived opportunity.

That’s the difference.

Instead of chasing more traffic to grow revenue, they increased revenue per visitor at the moment of highest buying intent.

For D2C brands, that’s how checkout shifts from being a payment step to becoming a revenue engine.

ShopPass turned anonymous visitors into reachable revenue

Before ShopPass, they could only retarget customers who entered their details during checkout.

That meant:

Limited abandoned checkout recovery
No ability to engage browse abandoners
Large portions of traffic going unidentified

With ShopPass:

More than 60% of visitors are now identified
They are able to collect contact details even if the customer hasn’t manually entered them
They can retarget browse abandoners, not just checkout abandoners

This opened up:

WhatsApp retargeting
New product announcements
Sale campaigns
Retention messaging

For a supplement brand, where repeat purchases drive profitability, this visibility is critical. It shifted them from reactive remarketing to proactive retention.

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Impact

Metric	Change
RTO %	From 20% to 2%
AOV	+32%
Conversion rate	+1.15%
COD to Prepaid	From 30% to 90%

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Bottom line

Today more than 50% of their customers are repeat buyers. But for Himanshu, that’s just the starting point.

The focus going forward is clear:

Strengthening repeat purchases
Exploring Shopflo’s loyalty programs
Implementing rewards systems

And after two years of working with Shopflo, the brand has moved from firefighting RTO and cash flow pressure to building predictable, retention-led growth.

For Ripped Up Nutrition, the next phase won’t be driven by more traffic.

It will be driven by deeper customer relationships built on a checkout system designed to scale with brands.

“Marketing brings demand. But checkout decides whether you actually make money. Choose wisely.”

Himanshu Verma, Founder, Ripped Up Nutrition

Curious how this could work for you?

Let’s make it real. Book a call with our team, and we’ll show you exactly how Shopflo can drive real impact for your brand.

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