£9M Ecommerce Sales: 6 Takeaways From the Success of CarMats.co.uk

In May 2020, during the height of the COVID pandemic, Ash Young started an ecommerce store selling car mats in the UK. His goal was to hit £1M in sales in a year. He hit that target in just 9 months. Today his store has turned over ~£9M.

Given that the site’s monthly traffic peaked at just ~23K (according to Ahrefs), that’s impressive!

Peak monthly search traffic for carmats.co.uk according to Ahrefs

Curious how he did it (and how the rest of us mere mortals might be able to replicate his success), I sat down with Ash to dissect the key pieces of the puzzle and learn about his future plans for the store.

Below are takeaways from our chat that I hope will help anyone looking to follow in his footsteps.

the second most popular car here), but it’s interesting how Ash didn’t just do the typical SEO thing of relying solely on keyword research.

Estimated search volume for keywords related to Ford Focus car mats

While it matters that people are searching for your products if you plan to drive traffic from search, knowing the target market is equally as important. Ash having a Ford Focus meant he was the target market and could actually test his product firsthand.

It also meant that he only had to find and source one product to begin with, allowing him to test and validate his idea quickly.

How did he do that? By driving paid traffic to the product landing page via Google Ads:

Paid traffic to the site over time, according to Ahrefs

Doing this allowed him to get a sense of whether the numbers worked. Could he drive consistent traffic, deliver a quality product, and make at least some profit—or did things simply not add up?

Given that he’s on track to hit £10M in total sales early next year, you can probably guess the answer…

Crucially, though, he made an effort not to make his store look like it only stocked one product. He built out the full menu so it looked like any other store. The only difference was that the rest of the products weren’t clickable.

Ash launched the site with just one product: Ford Focus car mats

He then slowly populated the store with other models over the coming months, again by combining a mix of keyword research and common sense to keep things logistically possible.

We tried to do it one manufacturer at a time, so we did all of Ford and then moved on to other popular manufacturers before smaller ones. […] If you end up running around doing, say, the top 20 top-selling models [as per keyword research] then you’ll end up in a pickle very quickly.

MVP route makes sense in theory… why have the hassle of fulfilling products from day one when your goal is just to prove the model, right?

But Ash said he fulfilled all orders from the start, and his reason was super interesting.

If you took 50 orders and didn’t fulfill any of them and refunded them all, you’re going to get some really negative press right off the bat. Negativity is just not what you want when you’re trying to start up.

It’s important to remember that Ash was trying to build a legit brand here, not just a throwaway site to make bank for a few months before tanking.

Of course, it might seem like this isn’t so important for a site selling car mats. After all, even Ash himself admitted that repeat custom isn’t a big driver of sales for the brand. So, pride aside, why does reputation really matter?

Personally, I think it has to do with how people buy things online…

If you’re anything like me, then I doubt you would just search “car mats” and pull the trigger on the first site you click. You’d at least head back to Google and search for the brand’s reviews first.

Here’s what you see if you do that for Ash’s site:

Positive reviews for the site like this help to increase conversions

By shipping quality products from day one, Ash was able to build a solid reputation from the get-go. Just scroll back to early reviews on TrustPilot and you’ll see that these were coming in thick and fast just months after he started the site.

Ash focussed on getting reviews right from the start

This helps to relieve any anxiety potential customers might have and no doubt leads to more of them actually pulling the trigger and buying from his store. In turn, this leads to a better return on ad spend and other marketing activities.