Buy It Direct is one of the UK’s largest privately owned online retailers. With brands like Appliances Direct, Laptops Direct and Better Bathrooms, they’re a go-to for everything from tech to furniture.

But with scale comes pressure. Pressure to grow. To convert. And to protect profit in a market that often relies on blanket promotions. The team at Buy It Direct decided it was time to find a smarter way.

Jay Shufflebottom leads trading across appliances and tech. He owns performance, promotions, profitability, and the commercial decisions that sit behind them. When he first heard about intent-first experiences, he was curious. When he saw the numbers, he and company CEO Nick, were both convinced.

“Our discount strategy is reliant on Made With Intent and we've seen margin enhancement improvements of over 10% as a result.”
Jay Shufflebottom, Trading Manager, Buy It Direct Group

“Understanding and targeting customer intent has added well over £1m in incremental revenue in less than 6 months. It is our secret weapon.”
Nick Glynne, CEO & Founder, Buy It Direct Group

Buy It Direct Without Intent

Before Made With Intent, Buy It Direct relied heavily on blanket discounting. Not because it was strategic, but because it was standard. Like many, they’d accepted that giving something away was the easiest lever to pull when trading got tough.

“Discount codes became the go-to. When sales were soft, the answer was always: discount more.”
Jay Shufflebottom, Trading Manager, Buy It Direct Group

But Jay and the team knew it wasn’t optimal. Discounts were applied too early. To too many. With no real control over who actually needed one. Every time they defaulted to mass incentives, margins suffered.

Jay’s team tried to work around it. They tested delivery offers and adjusted time-based triggers. But without a clear way to isolate at-risk users or read behavioural signals in real time, every change felt like guesswork.

“A lot of what we were doing was either all or nothing... discount or not. This helped us find the middle ground.”
Jay Shufflebottom, Trading Manager, Buy It Direct Group

They’d tried testing delivery discounts before, but had no way of targeting visitors who were genuinely at risk of dropping out. It felt like guesswork.

“We wanted to plug revenue gaps, sure. But we wanted to do it without sacrificing profitability. That’s where intent came in.”
Jay Shufflebottom, Trading Manager, Buy It Direct Group

Jay had two hypotheses: could they stop PPC landers from bouncing when they didn’t like the first product they saw? And could they target discounts only at visitors who truly needed them?

Buy It Direct With Intent

The Buy It Direct team used Made With Intent to move from generic tactics to responding to context. And while Jay admits he wasn’t sure at first…

“When I first saw the tool, I’ll be honest, I thought that sounds too easy. How’s it going to know?”
Jay Shufflebottom, Trading Manager, Buy It Direct Group

…the first tests changed that quickly.

“That doubt was removed once we saw results. The discount control group was 10% under. We lifted it above average.”
Jay Shufflebottom, Trading Manager, Buy It Direct Group

Discounting with Intent

Buy It Direct focused first on their checkout, where high-intent visitors frequently dropped off due to delivery costs or lingering doubts.

Using Convert Abandon segments, they triggered discounts only when abandonment signals were present. Instead of guessing who might need help, they could now act based on real-time behaviour.

But Jay's team didn’t stop at conversion rate. They monitored redemption levels, margin recovery, and net profitability. One of the most telling early results: a variant that had previously run at a loss turned profitable through better targeting.

“Some discount variants were loss-making before. Now they’re profitable - with cost savings too.”
Jay Shufflebottom, Trading Manager, Buy It Direct Group

For Better Bathrooms, the team tested a targeted checkout discount offer for visitors with clear purchase intent. Instead of showing discounts to everyone, they triggered them only for those showing signs of exit, leading to a 26% lift in conversion rate.

Meanwhile, Appliances Direct focused on margin savings. By identifying users who didn't need a discount to convert, they showed no incentive at all and saved 42% of margin on that audience in the process.

“Teams that didn’t want to run discounts before are now asking to. They’ve seen the impact, and it’s changed the conversation.”
Jay Shufflebottom, Trading Manager, Buy It Direct Group

Other plays followed fast. 

Exploring Delivery, Discovery and Email Capture

Once shown to every visitor, free delivery promotions were now reserved for those with high purchase intent and clear objections at checkout.

“Seeing the control group’s results made us realise how wrong we’d been before. It just works.”
Jay Shufflebottom, Trading Manager, Buy It Direct Group

Meanwhile, for visitors arriving deep from PPC, discovery journeys became smarter. They trialled a stripped-back PDP for those ready to buy and used nudges like recently viewed products for those still comparing. This created a 19% increase in add-to-bag rate for low-intent visitors.

And email capture? Once triggered by time, now triggered by intent. A shift that didn’t just reduce impressions, it significantly boosted signups. In fact, they saw an 82% increase in email submissions with 51% fewer impressions by triggering it for visitors who had built intent.

“Before Intent, we had to pick one version of the journey for everyone. Now, we tailor it to the visitor in front of us.”
Jay Shufflebottom, Trading Manager, Buy It Direct Group

The Impact

Within 6 months of using Made With Intent Buy It Direct added over £1m in incremental revenue and saved 10%+ in margin. Just by stopping discounts where they weren’t needed and triggering them where they were. And the numbers only tell part of the story.

Intent has also changed how the business works. The biggest shift? Confidence. Now, when trading is soft or margins come under pressure, the team doesn’t panic. They act. Intent-first experiences give them options, options that can get around dev bottlenecks or blunt fallback tactics.

“There’s less compromise now. Customers get the experience that matches where they are in the journey.”
Jay Shufflebottom, Trading Manager, Buy It Direct Group

And intent is no longer isolated to trading. It’s influencing how the wider business thinks about segmentation, CRM timing, and even product prioritisation.

Collaboration got faster too. With hands-on support from Made With Intent, the team launched, learned, and iterated faster than they could on their own.

“Having people who’ve done it work with us before helps us go faster. The Made With Intent team have been brilliant.”
Jay Shufflebottom, Trading Manager, Buy It Direct Group

And the shift isn’t stopping.

Intent is now being applied across other brands in the group, like Laptops Direct, where product journeys are longer and margins tighter. They're moving along our Intent Maturity Scale, exploring new ways to use real-time behaviour, like surfacing tailored help content to users comparing products or showing signs of struggle.

Want to stop wasting margin and start using discounts only where they pay off? Book a Made With Intent demo and see what intent-first trading looks like in action.