Cross-border logistics · Singapore & Malaysia · 2025
How Buy&Ship cut cost per acquisition by 86%
Buy&Ship had hit a ceiling on Google Search. We rebuilt acquisition around Meta video creative in the same two markets — and brought the cost per proxy-shopping request down to a fraction of what search cost.
The brand
A simpler way to shop the world
Buy&Ship is a regional proxy-shopping and cross-border logistics platform serving shoppers across APAC. It gives people a local forwarding address in markets like the US, UK, Japan and Korea, consolidates their parcels, and ships everything to their door — so they can buy from international retailers that don't ship locally, or that charge a fortune to.
It solves a real, recurring problem. But it's also a behaviour most shoppers haven't tried yet: the value clicks the moment someone sees how it works, and rarely before. That distinction shaped everything about how we approached growth.
The challenge
Search had hit its ceiling
When Buy&Ship ran acquisition in Singapore and Malaysia themselves, the engine was Google Search. Search is excellent at one thing — capturing demand that already exists. Someone typing "ship from US to Singapore" is most of the way to converting.
The problem is that pool is finite. The high-intent keywords are competitive, bids rise as you push for volume, and there are only so many people searching for a service they may not know exists. Cost per proxy-shopping request had settled at S$25.30 and wasn't coming down. To grow, Buy&Ship needed a channel that could create demand, not just harvest it — and do it more efficiently.
The approach
Meta video, built to teach the behaviour
We moved the centre of gravity to Meta — Facebook and Instagram — built around video creative, while keeping the exact same two markets so the comparison against the previous baseline stayed clean.
The logic was simple: proxy shopping is something you show, not a keyword you bid on. A 10–20 second video can walk through the entire loop — shop any overseas store, ship to a local Buy&Ship address, receive it at home — in a way a text search ad never can. And Meta reaches the much larger group of people who'd never think to search for the service, but light up the second they see it.
We treated creative as the primary lever. Several video angles ran against each other — the "this store doesn't ship here" frustration, the savings math, the unboxing payoff — each cut for the feed and for Reels. Spend concentrated on the winners, and we iterated on what the data rewarded.
The results
From S$25.30 to S$3.49
Cost per proxy-shopping request fell from S$25.30 to S$3.49 — an 86% reduction, and roughly a 7× efficiency gain on the same outcome. The same budget now generated far more requests, through a channel Buy&Ship hadn't been using for performance.
Just as important, acquisition was no longer boxed in by search volume. Video creative on Meta gave Buy&Ship a lever they could keep scaling, in two markets where the previous approach had plateaued.
Search harvests demand. Video creates it. For a category people don't yet know to look for, the cheapest acquisition usually isn't on the search bar.