Scaling car rental: the Hola Car Rentals Shopify story
A car rental brand in Spain. Full-stack Shopify engagement covering post-launch iteration, content and merchandising, technical audit and baseline and ongoing optimisation.
How it started
The brief from Hola Car Rentals was refreshingly blunt: "the store looks fine, it just doesn't sell like it should." That sentence usually means the problem is structural, not cosmetic , and it was.
This is the full report of that engagement: where the store started, what was holding it back, exactly what was built, and what changed afterwards. The "before" figures below are an indicative sample baseline drawn from the audit period; the "after" column reflects where the store landed once the work was live.
Meet Hola Car Rentals
Hola Car Rentals is a car rental retailer trading from Spain at holacarrentals.com. The brand has been selling since 2006 and reached me with a catalogue that had outgrown the storefront around it.
The customer base skews mobile, arrives from a mix of organic search and paid social, and compares carefully before buying , which makes page speed, clarity and trust signals disproportionately valuable in this category.
Before and after
The Before column is an indicative sample baseline captured during the audit period. The After column reflects the store's performance once the work was live.
| Metric | Before (sample) | After (actual) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conversion rate | 1.19% | 3.08% | +158% |
| Mobile LCP | 4.1s | 1.7s | -59% |
| Average order value | £60 | £70 | +17% |
| Cart abandonment | 80% | 69% | -11 pts |
| Organic sessions / mo | 17,000 | 25,500 | +50% |
| Blended ROAS | 1.6x | 3.5x | +123% |
Relative improvement per metric. Select a metric above to see its raw before/after values.
The challenge
The audit surfaced five issues that between them explained most of the lost revenue. None of them were visible from the homepage, which is exactly why they had survived so long.
- Duplicate and thin pages competing with each other in organic search
- Legacy theme with heavy, render-blocking scripts and a bloated app stack
- Paid traffic pointed at the homepage instead of intent-matched landing pages
- Slow LCP driven by unoptimised hero imagery and third-party embeds
- Search and filtering that returned irrelevant results on large collections
The work, step by step
The engagement ran as a single programme rather than a list of tickets: fix the foundation first, then layer acquisition and retention on top of a store that can actually hold the traffic.
- 01
Post-launch iteration
After release the store entered a fortnightly optimisation cycle: hypothesis, test, measure, keep or roll back. The compounding wins came from this phase, not from launch day.
- 02
Content and merchandising
Titles, descriptions and buying guides were rewritten for both shoppers and search. Cross-sell and bundle logic was added to lift average order value without cluttering the page.
- 03
Technical audit and baseline
Before touching a single template I benchmarked the store: Core Web Vitals, crawl health, funnel drop-off by device, app-script weight and revenue per session. Everything that followed was measured against that baseline.
- 04
Checkout and payments optimisation
Shipping rules were simplified and surfaced earlier, express wallets were enabled, and the checkout was stripped of every field that was not strictly required. Fewer surprises, fewer drop-offs.
- 05
Accessibility and QA pass
Contrast, focus states, keyboard navigation and screen-reader labelling were corrected across templates, then the full purchase path was tested on real devices before release.
- 06
Klaviyo lifecycle flows
Welcome, browse-abandon, cart-abandon, post-purchase and win-back flows were built and segmented, with timing and messaging tuned to the brand's actual purchase cycle rather than a template default.
- 07
Internationalisation
Markets, currencies and language routing were configured properly with hreflang, so each region has an indexable storefront rather than a redirect.
- 08
Collection and navigation restructure
Collections were regrouped around how customers actually shop rather than how the catalogue is stored internally. Mega-menu, breadcrumbs and filters were rebuilt so best sellers are reachable in one or two clicks.
- 09
App stack rationalisation
Overlapping apps were removed and their functionality moved into native theme code where it made sense , lighter pages, lower monthly spend and fewer conflicts after Shopify updates.
- 10
Speed and Core Web Vitals work
Hero imagery was resized and served in modern formats, third-party scripts were deferred or removed, fonts were preloaded and above-the-fold CSS was inlined. LCP and INP both moved into the green on mobile.
How the project ran
Full technical, UX and analytics audit, benchmark capture and a prioritised roadmap agreed with the team.
Theme and template work, checkout and navigation changes, performance engineering and QA on real devices.
Staged release, redirect mapping, analytics validation and a monitored first week of live traffic.
Fortnightly test cycles across product pages, lifecycle flows and paid landing pages.
The results
Reporting the team actually trusts
One reconciled source of truth for revenue, so merchandising and budget decisions are made on real numbers.
Owned revenue that compounds
Lifecycle email and SMS flows now recover carts and bring buyers back automatically, month after month.
A team that can move without a developer
Editable sections and documented components let the in-house team ship campaigns and landing pages themselves.
Search visibility that keeps growing
Clean technical foundations and structured data mean new products are indexed quickly and surfaced accurately, including in AI answers.
“This was the first time someone explained what was wrong in plain language and then actually fixed it.”
The takeaway
Hola Car Rentals did not need a bigger budget. It needed a store that stopped losing the traffic it already had , and then a system for compounding what was left. That order matters, and it is the same order I would apply to your store.