for each aspect / element on your site we were looking at
TRANSCRIPT
We’ve structured the feedback and suggestions page by page. There’s no filler content, we just go straight
to the point.
For each aspect / element on your site we were looking at the following things:
Design, usability and user experience
Clarity – is it easy to understand, what is it, what does it do, who is it for?
Distraction – is there anything that stops users from taking desired behavior?
User confidence - do the users feel empowered and at ease?
Fears, doubts, uncertainties – what are all the sources of friction?
We
Conducted a thorough evaluation of the site with our expert team of conversion and UX specialists
Dug through user survey answers
Ran a usability test with 10 targeted people
Conducted 10 phone interviews
This model helps us identify where the flow is „stuck”.
Look at the ‘layers’ or ‘levels’ reached
Focuses on depth of engagement, not pages viewed
Helps to see the key loss steps, like a funnel
It helps to see the ‘big picture’ involved
This is your most recent 4-week cycle. Total unique pageviews: 154,569.
Main insights from this:
The biggest problem by far is the product page.
Cart pages loses ~50% of the people
Category to product page loss ~22%
We conducted a usability test with 10 people who have an allergy. Usabiltity tests with 10 relevant people
find 95% of problems or more (more testers will not provide sufficient ROI – law of diminishing returns).
The good: your checkout flow is intuitive and easy to use, no one experienced problems with it.
The bad: you do have usability problems that affect your sales in a negative way.
Main issues that need to be fixed:
The popup was annoying to 100% of the testers, and severly disrupted the flow. They could not
even see the site and what it was about as they were interrupted by the popup.
Proposed solution: either replace the popup with a scroll triggered box, or have the popup appear at
a later time (after 3 pageviews, 1 minute etc). This would not only improve the comprehension of
the site, but also opt-in rates.
Remove captcha from the form. If fake submissions are an issue, you can solve with double opt-in.
None of the testers noticed the Learning Library.
Proposed solution: add a link to it in the header as that gets attention.
Even when people were searching for a specific product, they were browsing menus instead of
using search as they didn’t even see it.
Proposed solution: make search more prominent.
When people were asked to find a product that relieves their particular allergy, only 1 out of 10
found the “I need relief from” select box – even though they would have quickly found what they
needed.
Proposed solution: make this drop down more prominent.
Huge issue: product comparison. We asked people to find an air purifier that matches their needs.
Every single tester experienced severe problems and no one was able to compare and evaluate
different products. Categorizing air purifiers by brand was a bad idea according to each tester.
o They could not find a way to compare different models based on features and different
criteria (serviceable area size, microns etc).
o They wanted to find highest-rated cheapest products. It’s not possible to sort products this
way.
o They wanted to compare products across brands: not possible.
Proposed solutions:
1) You need to have a side by side compare feature – ability to add 2 to 4 products onto a
comparison grid, and compare them on relevant information.
2) Re-think the organization of air purifiers, and how people find the right one for them. Instead
of categorization – which is too limiting and very difficult to get right – use filters to narrow
down choice (like the right hand sidebar here: https://winelibrary.com/).
We recommend having all air purifiers together on the same page, but you can narrow down
the choice by cost, brand, ratings, technical parameters and other important criteria.
People jumped to conclusions based on a single user rating. People were turned off by the 1-star
rating of a HEPA air purifier, even though that was only a rating given by a single user.
Proposed solution: stars are only shown for products with 3, 5 or more ratings, reviews are
always displayed.
Adding product to the cart was difficult. People hated having to enter quantity, and nearly all of
them had to experience the error message which disrupted the flow.
At the same time, half the test subjects did not understand the way upsells were proposed. Some
confused it with shopping cart contents, some thought these are different products (which at
times they are). Click map data also tells us that most people stop scrolling down past this if the
list is too long (like it is with Bedcare Allergen Mattress Cover), and never reach the full
product information section.
Proposed solutions:
1) Make the quantity selection a dropdown box that defaults to 1.
2) Add variations /sizes into a separate drop-down menu
3) Test 2 options for upsells: add them to the cart page (where the user is taken immediately after
adding a product to the cart) and a dedicated section on the product page (similar to how it is
now, but with clear explanations and design solution).
People wanted to read the full product description at once. Clicking on a “read more” link
created confusion after the click – “what happened, where am I now?”.
People did not expect to see Promotional Codes as the first thing in the shopping cart view. As
one tester commented:
“It makes me ask “Why don’t I have a promo code?” This makes me jealous. Like I’m not special.
I would leave the site, and start searching for a coupon online.”
Your shopping cart page is one of the weakest links in your sales funnel. Only about half of the
people proceed to the next step. Our hypothesis is that the prominent promo code section is
driving a portion of people away, looking for a coupon.
If you want them to find them anyway from RetailMeNot, it’d be better to display coupons right
on your site, and make everyone happy.
We recommend placing it below the shopping cart, and make proceeding to the next step as the
most prominent option. Some people wanted to add coupons in the payment screen: we
recommend adding another coupon entering option there.
Live chat was disturbing people as they filled out the forms. It was too close to the form fields,
and popped open when people tried to navigate between fields.
Proposed solution: move Live Chat to the right side.
Some of the testers could not easily figure out what the site is about. It lacks a value
proposition. If it’s not a core part of your brand, we recommend re-thinking the slogan “for a
healthier you” as it’s too vague and also used by other companies.
Proposed solution: state your unique value proposition next to the logo that communicates
clearly what this site is about, who’s it for and how it’s better/different from the competition
(why buy from here).
Too small font size. Several people had trouble reading the text.
Proposed solution: increase body copy size to at least 14px, if not 16px.
Supporting links like Shipping info, Contacts etc are hard to find. People expect them to be in
the footer and/or header.
Searchers are buyers. It common that people who use search function on ecommerce sites tend to be 2-3x
more likely to complete a purchase.
This is the difference in your case (last 12 months):
The difference is nearly 5x. That’s huge.
Rhetorical question: what would happen if we could get 10% or 20% more people to search?
Your current site search is not visible. Only 4.62% use search. A large portion of searches don’t even enter
a search keyword. The search results are also lacking – no product description is provided and the call to
action is „buy now”.
Recommendations:
Make search more prominent (e.g. Amazon style)
Show preview results in the search box as you type
Show improved search results: focus on the product (more space), better description and CTA to
see more details.
Conversion rate U. Pageviews Transactions
1. Visits With Site Search 19.49% 323,254 7,267
2. Visits Without Site Search 4.47% 2,002,636 34,421
Question: Why do you show discontinued products in your search results – who would want to find
those?
You have Canadian buyers, but they convert at a much lower rate (avg 0.51%). Increasing this
could mean a significant increase in revenue over 12 month period. In the last 12 months you made
only $13,392.72 from Canadian buyers. If we can increase conversion rate for Canadians to 3%,
that would mean over $65,000 more revenue. We recommend you add a personalized message to
Canadian visitors, confirming that you do ship to Canada.
Your best converting US states are Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware and Hawaii – but all of
them bring in much less visitors than other states. Can you increase traffic from those state via geo-
targeting?
Your lowest converting states are Idaho, Utah and Alaska. You might want avoid paying for traffic
in those states.
Top 10 states by paid traffic volume: New Jersey and Texas convert somewhat lower than others.
Experiment with geo-targeted messages to visitors from those states to boost conversions.
On average, your days perform more or less equally with the exception of Friday, where
conversions are slightly lower. We recommend not doing any big promos on Fridays.
Your returning visitors convert the best on Sundays (cr 8.72%). This is the day you might want to
consider sending out promo emails to your email list. Make sure you compare this to your email
analytics (open rates, clickthroughts, revenue per email).
Best days for PPC traffic conversions are Wednesday (6.42%) and Tuesday (5.94%). If you can
increase ad spend on those days, might be a good idea. Lowest performing day is Sunday (5.06%)
even though that’s when you get the largest PPC visitor volume. You might want to experiement
with a special offer for Sunday PPC visitors to take advantage of the increased traffic.
Your average best converting time period is between 10am and 8pm. Highest peaks are 11am
(5.29%), 3pm (5.24%) and 1pm (5.21%). The absolute low point is between midnight and 7am.
Best converting time period for returning visitors is 10am and 4pm, highest point being at 1pm. We
could conclude here that the best time to send out promo emails for you is around 10am.
Banner blindness is rampant: anything served as a banner is ignored and only contributes to
busyness and visual complexity.
Recommendation: minimize the usage of banners.
Vast majority of the visitors do not scroll much. This is especially bad on product pages where
most of the product information is not seen nor read. On the home page and category pages people
don’t look past products, everything below is largely ignored.
Recommendation: make layouts more compact.
In the category view people are not clicking on ‘buy now’ buttons (not ready to buy after just
seeing a thumbnail, product name and price), but on text links.
Recommendation: change the main call to action to ‘see details’.
Social media sharing buttons are ignored, and nothing is shared. Our experience is that people
share interesting content, not products on social media.
Recommendation: they should be removed as they merely contribute to the clutter.
On the checkout page the payment information is way too down and some people don’t see it.
Recommendation: Payment form should be brought up as that’s the most important part of the
page. This can be achieved by moving the confirmation info (shipping & billing address) to the
right sidebar.
Overwhelming majority opts for guest checkout on the cart page. People don’t see upsell offers.
Recommendation: Guest checkout should be made the most prominent thing on the cart page.
Shopping cart contents should be made more compact in the favor of bringing upsell offers further
up the page.
There were only 34 responses to the survey.
75% of the respondents did not use the paper catalog before making a purchase
42% were referred by their healthcare provider
Key reasons for buying from you
Low price
Recommendation by their healthcare provider
Good reviews for products
Product selection
Free shipping (coupon)
How they chose which product to buy
Doctor’s recommendation / samples
Highest rating / cheapest price combination
Positive product reviews
Based on their specific need (no comparison shopping)
Not available anywhere else
Price
What they liked about their experience
Reviews
Fast delivery
Simple checkout process
What could be better:
“It would be nice to see a bullet list of the specific allergens each product helps with and another
list of it's uses. For instance, I had to check the vital oxide website to find that it is safe to spray
on fabrics and that it can be added to laundry in the wash. Your online description really only
makes it clear that it works on hard surfaces. The paper catalog had better descriptions.”
“The more product options the better - you can't have too many choices. Especially bed sheets, if
there were more options I'd probably order from you instead of Bed Bath & Beyond”
“I was not able to "compare" products which is why I called to speak with someone.”
Shipping prices are high
Product descriptions don't always fully list which allergens they protect against
Comparison shopping
About 88% compared your offer to multiple sites (Amazon most mentioned, but also Target, Beth
Bath & Beyond, allergy sites). We have to assume that people are always comparing the offer,
hence we need to make sure there’s a clearly perceived advantage to ordering from you.
Main sources of friction (doubts, hesitations)
Doubts whether the product will work as promised
Unfamiliar website / first visit
Cost of shipping
Not able to compare different products
Recommendations
If you can, keep experimenting with free shipping. We know from research and experience that
the the difference between $0 and $0.01 is bigger than $0.01 and $1. Free matters.
For each product you sell, have a dedicated section/tab about the allergens it protects against
Long tail: increase the product selection to be able to compete with Amazon and the like
Reviews are hugely valuable: put more effort into collection them via automated emails that
request feedback. Also, make reviews more prominent in the product pages.
Build more trust with new visitors. The trust marks in the footer are not noticed (most people do
not scroll down there). You could experiment with displaying your BizRate Customer Satisfaction
Ratings in the sidebar to alleviate fears.
Your conversion rate for returning visitors is ~2.5x higher (3.3% vs 7.26%, last 4 cycles July 21st
to Aug 18th). We recommend you give incentives to new visitors to complete their new purchase
(e.g. 10% off or free shipping for first-time buyers). Offer might be served with a cookie-based
popup (only new visitors see it). You can see how Naked Wines is doing it
http://us.nakedwines.com/ (and order some wine while you’re at it).
Sorting and comparison functionality has to be implemented: people should be able to compare
products, and sort them within the same larger category by using filters (as was recommended
previously).
We managed to complete 7 out of 9 calls (we were provided 9 numbers). The missing 2 never answered
their phones.
They are not typical internet shoppers. Many only bought something because the doctor told them
to.
They look for exactly what the doctor recommended. Search functionality and placement are super
important.
Main anxiety is that they want EXACTLY what the doctor told them. They are coming in, looking
for the exact wording as in the brochure. One guy came looking for pillow encasements, but
couldn’t find them and had a frustrating experience.
They are very price sensitive. They considered most products very expensive, but they regarded
the products to be of high quality because of it. Coupons are very compelling to them.
You seem to have a brand among these people: people perceive that this is a serious, medical
website (due to its focus) and offers products that really help. This was especially important for
women. Several people looked at products in Amazon, and saw many cheaper ones, but were
worried that those products will not really help. You are selling relief from fear. This is huge, and
you could potentially use this concept more in your marketing.
You have a huge potential for a referral program. This is stuff that people talk about, and your
target group is very social (middle aged and older women). Many mentioned how they are going
tell their friends and family about how they got over problem X or Y. You just have to incentivize
and empower people, and take advantage of how price sensitive they are.: „Refer a friend and get a
$10 gift card” or „both get -10%” (this would remove the fear of selling to their friends) type of
offers would work well.
Some were very brand conscious – either their doctor recommended one, or they had done their
own research. It’s important to offer filtering by brand option in the category view.
Everybody wants more reviews. Be more aggressive about collecting reviews. If you don’t do it
yet, start sending out automatic emails to collect reviews. Incentivize this – it’s directly affecting
your bottom line.
People really care about the ratings. For each category, they want to be able to sort and filter by
ratings.
Some people are looking for specific fabric grade and/or pore size microns. You’d benefit from
enabling people to search / filter by this.
People want to know how to use and how to take care of products. You should add this info to
product pages.
Air Purifiers: people care about the size of air purifiers, and how much noise it makes. Dimensions
alone might not be enough, show the product in context. For noise, they have no concept of the
decibells – would like to see it placed on a scale.
Most people just buy what the doctor told them to. Some said they’d want to know what goes with
that product. There’s an axiety about picking the wrong product. They want better product
recommendations. What goes best with this? What else should I buy?
You have great upselling potential here, e.g. if they pillow covers, offer them mattress cover too.
Offering bundles could potentially work very well.
This also tells us that you have a good potential for personalized email offers for matching
products. If somebody buys a mattress, send them emails upselling mattress covers or pillow
covers. Start using personalized offer email system to automate this.
People like the emails that you send out, they are looking forward to special offers and coupons.
One person said she’d like to get her doctor’s name on the invoice – to show her insurance
company.
People want to know more about products and their key ingredients. What about having a
glossary of ingredient that explain it all? Could be also a source for SEO traffic.
People are unclear how to claim their Facebook free shipping offer.
Several people ask about updating their order info. Might need a dedicated link for this?
Form field validation is a source of friction.
People are constantly struggling with coupon codes. I recommend you re-think the system.
Lots of people ask about washing instructions, you might want to consider adding it to the product
description.
We looked at the following competing websites:
{REMOVED}
Insights
All of the websites look rather outdated and thus similar. There is an opportunity here to
stand out from the rest with superior design, user experience and usability.
None of them are mobile responsive, or serve a different mobile website. The opportunity
here is to provide a superior mobile experience.
As most survey respondents said they do comparison shopping, it’s important to know why
they might choose somebody else. Note that the following items are based on the
perception (e.g. your customer service might be superior, but they won’t see it on your
website and hence it won’t matter for new customers).
o XXX has product videos
o XXX and YYY seem to have better, more compact product pages with better
structure
o XXX, YYY have better filters at category page level, making it easier to find a
suitable product
o YYY, XXX, ZZZ offer free shipping options
o ZZZ indicates on the product page how many hours until a product could be
shipped out (anxiety relief, time pressure)
o XXX, YYY, ZZZ have a more compact and focused cart page
I did not perform a pricing comparison, but I’m sure you’re fully aware how you compare in
terms of pricing.
I conclude here that with modern, mobile optimized design you could have have one more
perceivable advantage over the competition. Improved user experience would help you boost
customer loyalty. You need to create better filters for narrowing down the selection, and to
improve product page layout. If at all possible, make shipping free (at least starting from $X).
Here are issues we recommend fixing:
You have multiple checkout funnels: guest checkout and login checkout. You need to
be able to track these separately. Right now the URLs are identical, hence it’s
impossible. The problem with this setup is that the reported funnel data is inacurate.
You need to add event tracking for cart adds. We can right now see how many people
go to the cart page, but we can’t track actual ’add to cart’ button clicks. In order to
optimize for more cart adds, we need to start tracking it.
Track cart removes: which products were added, then removed?
Track product page tab interactions.
Track video plays (on product pages)
Track „looks”. How many people look at a product or category and then do not buy
that product. If people are looking at a product, but not buying it, there is some
friction there.
Track coupon code usage.
Track product category for each transaction.
Track all load times: add this line to GA tracking script
_gaq.push(['_setSiteSpeedSampleRate', 100]);
Add enhanced link attribution tracking for improved in-page analytics data:
var pluginUrl =
'//www.google-
analytics.com/plugins/ga/inpage_linkid.js';
_gaq.push(['_require', 'inpage_linkid', pluginUrl]);
Add error message tracking with Event Tracking. This would include 404 messages
and also form validation issues which provide critical insight to improving
conversions.
Add virtual pageviews for category and product pages.
Remove GA tracking from popups (newsletter_promo.php) – it artificially lowers the
bounce rate, measures engagement when there isn’t any, messes up referral data.
Instead, you could trigger a non-bounce event.
Track viewport size. This is the area that the browser makes available in which to
display your web page and is the size that you need to be concerned with in
determining how your page will appear.
Your site is not optimized for speed. While your web host is fast, and home page and checkout pages load
relatively fast (can be easily made faster), category and product pages need improvement. Suggested
improvements:
Parallelize downloads across hostnames
Serve static content from a CDN-backed cookieless domain (look into Rackspace
Files or Amazon Cloudfront).
Start using a CDN
Add Expires headers
Minimize requests (over 120 requests for category pages and product pages)
Start using gzip compression
858.7KiB of JavaScript is parsed during initial page load. Defer parsing JavaScript to
reduce blocking of page rendering.
GeoTrust javascript adds almost 1 second
Nexttag icon adds half a second
Don’t load jquery files via Google, they add 1.5 seconds to the load
Combine images using CSS sprites
Serve resources from a consistent URL (http vs https)
Newsletter popup adds 3.89s
72% of your users are on a desktop or laptop computer, 28% on mobile devices (16% on smart phones and
12% on tablets). The trend is up – 68% relative growth compared to last year.
Since it’s close to 1/3rd of your total visits (and growing), we recommend that the next version of your
web design would be mobile responsive: have an adaptive layout that changes based on the screen size
between desktop and laptop versions, and serves a dedicated mobile version.
While your average conversion rate for desktop computers is 5.98% (July), it’s much lower for mobile
users as the user experience is bad: 3.35% for tablets and only 0.81% for smartphones.
Tablet conversions should be similar to desktop conversions, and almost 2x difference is sure sign of poor
user experience and possibly technical challenges.
Responsive design is a proven way to boost mobile conversions. For speed reasons, we do recommend
creating a separate mobile site. Website load speed is critical for smartphones that have slower connection
than wifi, and we can eliminate a lot of design and scripting elements for mobile specific version.
You should also make sure that every email you send out has responsive design – people read most emails
on their smartphones.
There is no prominent value proposition. There’s a significant amount of people who’ve never
heard of you and don’t know what you’re about. A large portion of your visits each month are
new. Your home page is a great place to tell the story and capture your essence in a value
proposition.
Strong value propositions are very good for conversions. Focus on clarity (what is this place and
for whom) and the end-benefit for the user. Answer the question „why should I buy from you and
not the competition?” You might want to play with expert and fear themes.
If it’s not a core part of your brand, we recommend re-thinking the slogan “for a healthier you” as
it’s too vague and also used by other companies. Aim to be specific instead. This could be used to
say something useful and impactful (see Trust point below).
Make search prominent in the header.
Show cart contents when hovering over Shopping Cart link. Example: Show cart contents when
hovering over Shopping Cart link. Example:
Build more trust. Most people ignore the footer logos. Ways to boost credibility:
Add a well-known trust mark in the header
Add “1,127,340 customers served since 1994” or equivalent message (social proof,
also shows you’ve been around for a while) somewhere in the header, near the
logo. You could even make that a live counter.
Show mentions in neutral third-party media outlets, something like this:
You want to play up your brand as ’we know allergies’, any doctor recommended
stuff will be good.
Missing value proposition. Explained in more detail under General Stuff.
Show your best selling products – they’re bound to have the largest appeal. You do claim to
show popular product on the home page, but it’s not true. In the last 6 months you’ve sold:
o 6 Miele vacuum cleaners (274th best selling)
o 279 Allerpet Solutions (47th best selling)
o 210 Filtrete Window AC filters (58th best selling)
Instead, show your true top 10 best selling products (or actually 6 to 12 – depending whether
there are 3 or 4 products per row, and if there’s 2 or 3 rows).
Here are your actual top 10 products (product name / price / avg qty):
1. A $11.07 2.57
2. B $10.66 2.77
3. C $10.97 2.85
4. D $14.67 2.61
5. E $6.83 4.05
6. F $21.23 2.33
7. G $8.88 1.81
8. H $46.31 1.52
9. I $30.66 1.43
10. J $10.66 2.14
Notice anything interesting? 8 out of 10 products cost around $10. These products serve as
fantastic wallet openers.
Wallet openers are useful products with mass appeal that are „no-brainers” cost wise. Once
they add their first product to the cart, they stop browsing – and start shopping.
De-clutter your home page and eliminate the banners – they serve only as a distraction.
People have severe banner blindness and ignore them.
Catalog request link gets 0.74% of clicks
Newsletter signup 0.34%
New products 0.47%
Made in America 0.29%
Clearly these links are either not of interest, or not visible. Since they take up a significant
real estate on the home page, yet provide little to no return, we recommend removing them.
Some of these links (New, Made in the US, Catalog request) could be added as navigation
links. Newsletter signup needs a better value proposition + needs to be served differently (i.e.
scroll triggered box).
Instead we can introduce a site-wide promotional bar under the primary navigation. This is a
common trend and users have come to expect it.
Your home page is mainly for navigation. Promo info should not take up more than 30%.
Re-word product calls to action. Change „Buy now” to „See details”. People don’t buy
something from category pages (after just seeing the name and price). Make them click
through to the product page.
Remove automatically advancing slider. Replace that with a static promo image (might be
tailored to geo-location).
Add the option to add a product to a comparison table (e.g. compare button appears when
hovering over a product).
Add product filters to the left hand sidebars that help people narrow down choice by specifying
(with the option to choose many criteria)
o Price range
o Ratings
o Brand
o On sale / special offer
o Problem category / condition
Sort the products in each category based on „best selling”.
Don’t show ratings if there’s less than 3 or 5 rating (unless they’re all positive). Single 1-star
rating can kill sales.
Use more product badges as they help people pick a product, and be more creative with badges.
Instead of just New item, Ships free, Exclusive and Clearance, add badges like „Award winning”,
„Energy saver”, „Top rated”, „Best in class”. Badges should help people make a decision, and
help certain products stand out based on criterias that matter to people. Some want the best, some
want the „green”, and so on.
Re-word product calls to action. Change „Buy now” to „See details”. People don’t buy
something from category pages (after just seeing the name and price). Make them click through to
the product page.
Increase product photo thumbnail size. This helps people find something they like faster.
Do a better job addressing customer anxiety about security, customer service and payment
options. Right now your security logos are below the footer where noone looks. Also – logos need
to be accompanied with text-based reassurances as most people won’t recognize the logos.
You can emphasize security by changing the CTA to ’Begin secure checkout”.
Show new / features products for each category. You can make this a filtering option.
This page is the weakest link.
Make the the page all about the product, remove left-hand navigation. The goal of the page is to
get them to add the product to the cart. Removing the navigation will also give you more space to
present the content.
Font size is tiny, body copy needs to be increased to 16px (same goes for all pages).
Adding product to cart needs to be complete re-thought, it’s a major source of friction.
o Default product quantity should be 1. They should never have to specify the quantity
o Add variations / sizes into a separate drop-down menu.
o Test 2 options for upsells: add them to the cart page (where the user is taken immediately
after adding a product to the cart) and a dedicated section on the product page (similar to
how it is now, but with clear explanations and new design solution).
Change product description layout.
o Instead of splitting the text into 2 chunks with „read more” link (usability problem), create
a summary section (1-2 sentences with bullet points of key features + ratings) plus full
description section (open by default).
Scroll map info shows that people don’t scroll down much on your product pages, so many of
them don’t read reviews. We tend to think a more compact, tabbed solution would work better
here. Our hypothesis is that more people will interact with the content this way, and making
Shipping info and Returns info available on the product page results in less cart abandonment.
Tabs: Product information, Specifications, Ratings & Reviews, Shipping & Returns, Care.
If you want to encourage upsells, you could add a Bundles tab where you give a discounted offer
for a budle purchase. Note that you don’t want to have too many tabs, so some could be
combined.
It’s impossible to know in advance if tabbed versions would definitely work better, so we
recommend a/b testing a tabbed version of the product pages against long scrolling page.
If you can, add product videos. Start with best selling / high traffic products, so we can a/b test the
effect on conversions. Videos should be served via platform that offers video analytics (e.g.
Wistia), so we can also measure the performance of the video itself – and learn to make better
videos.
Add another “Add to cart” button at the bottom of the product page – so when people get to the
bottom, they don’t have to scroll back up again.
One of the key reasons for abandoning shopping carts is unexpected shipping costs, or when
people can’t find shipping cost info. Right now shipping information is very hard to find.
You need to simplify your shipping pricing – have a flat fee if you can. If possible, offer
(conditional) free shipping.
Product photos make a huge difference in many categories – in your case this is about beddings
and technology (purifiers). People also have to like the way the product looks before they buy it.
Show photos in context, so people can imagine it at their home, and can understand the product
size. Dimensions are often too abstract.
Make the default product image size bigger.
Since most people comparison shop, and land on product pages directly, it’s a good idea to add
information about your unique advantages right on your product pages. Example:
Be smarter about product recommendations („Recommended products”). You might want to
consider using a tool like 4Tell to serve more relevant recommendations.
This page performs sub-optimally.
Cart pages does not look like a cart page. Most people have to scroll down to understand what this
page is. Move all the coupon info BELOW the cart contents. I understand that coupon codes are
an important part of your business, but there are other ways of making it visible. One example:
Keep CTA buttons above and below the cart contents (as cart can potentially get long with many
products)
Give a visual confirmation message that a product was added to cart (checkmark + text).
Make all buttons except for „Continue to checkout” less prominent, some of them text links.
Shipping transparency: Show shipping costs and when the product will be shipped out. Expected
delivery date, if possible.
Remove banners from this page.
You can could serve upsell options on the cart, either by offering insurance for technology
products, or by recommending supporting products with 1-click add options. Example:
Serve product recommendations underneath the cart contents (like you do now), but the
algorhithm needs to be smarter. It seems to offer quite stupid suggestions at the moment.
We recommend looking into integrating a smart recommenation system like http://www.4-
tell.com or similar.
Make changing the product quantity easier with +/- signs.
Overall funnel flow is very good. There’s is little drop-off once they get past the cart page. Your GA
funnel visualization does not provide fully accurate data because there are different flows. People who
log in skip one step.
Login page has no visual hierarchy, no button stands out from the rest:
Proposed solution: Make guest checkout (or Continue & Create Account) most prominent.
A better way would be NOT to give a choice here (so its either Login or Checkout for new people), but to
have them check out like guests, but offer the option to save an account AFTER they’ve completed the
purchase. Example:
Speedo gets 75% of guest checkout people to store their account data.
On the final checkout screen, you have on-page FAQ:
The problem is that the links open in a pop-up. While it’s better than navigation away, a lot of people use
pop-up blockers and/or hate popups. A better solution would be to use expand/collapse option.
Card declined issues
It’s not unusual that 5-10% (source) of online authorize / capture requests get declined in the first
attempt. On average the amount of lost sales due to “card declined” is 2-5% of revenue.
Since the error messages are usually vague, we recommend you suggest people to use alternative
payment methods on their next attempts. You could show an error message like this:
You might even want to show an active „Pay with PayPal” button along with the error message.
These pages get a lot of search engine traffic, but fail at directing people down the sales funnel.
Readability of the articles is terrible due to unreadable font size. As first priority, we should focus
on the reading experience here.
Many articles start with a product promo, serving as an immediate turn off.
Articles that help people understand a product category are doing well to funnel traffic to product
pages.
These people are mostly in the research phase, and hence they’re not likely to buy anything, so we
should capture their email instead.
State your uniqe value proposition here – this is where most new people land. Sell your story.
Roughly 56% of people abandon their shopping cart. Once you have people’s emails, you can start to
recover abandoned shopping carts and send other behavioral emails.
A very effective way to reduce shopping cart abandonment rates is following up by email. I see that
you’re already doing it, but don’t have metrics for it.
The email that you send out needs great improvement.
Issue #1 – Without images turned on (off for vast majority), it looks like this:
Issue #2 – The html of that email is terrible, it has a fixed width, so the whole email won’t fit even on
my 1920x1080 screen (far wider than most people’s screen).
Issue #3 – Change the subject line – current one does not address concerns. Your customers will be
much more likely to respond if they sense that you are genuinely interested in helping them. Make the
central tone worry and a desire to help. „Was there a problem with checking out?”
Issue #4 – Your email content is completely unfocused. The main thing – go back to your cart – is in the
third bullet, second sentence. The email content should be completely changed – addressing what
happened, and inviting them back.
We recommend the following sequence:
o 1st follow-up email send 30 min after inactivity. Content: Is everything in order? What happened?
Come back and complete the purchase. Instant response works the best.
o 2nd follow-up 23 hrs later: Content: Were you interrupted? You cart is still waiting for you here.
o Send 3rd email as well, 6 days and 23 hrs later. Here’s a 10% off coupon to help you change your
mind. (You don’t want to give out coupons too soon – that’d be rewarding abandonment).
You can recover ~15% of abandoned carts this way.
Some ecommerce platforms can do that out of the box, but there are also several add-on software
providers out there that can do this. Here are 2 to check out: Vero and Rejoiner.
Also, see my post on this http://conversionxl.com/shopping-cart-abandonment-how-to-recover-baskets-
of-money/
Send out behavioral emails. Figure out your average repurchase length (e.g. avg customer buys every 3
months), and send out a reminder email to them automatically if 3 months have passed from their last
order.
Also, if someone hasn’t logged in for say 12 months, send them an email and ask to come back. Might
incentivize it with a coupon, if possible.
TOP 25 landing pages (all traffic) Visits Avg. Time % New Vis Bounce Rate Conversion rate Transactions
4480 62.46 62.86% 17.99% 14.40% 645
2784 67.60 91.85% 58.62% 0.07% 2
1764 84.08 86.22% 47.79% 0.06% 1
1757 84.00 98.98% 96.53% 0.11% 2
1285 58.20 70.97% 26.46% 3.74% 48
1054 109.84 86.34% 54.55% 0.00% 0
1049 84.02 88.75% 55.39% 0.29% 3
782 71.25 16.62% 49.49% 17.52% 137
662 53.25 55.14% 11.78% 17.98% 119
607 111.05 82.04% 49.92% 2.97% 18
566 48.65 1.94% 71.38% 1.24% 7
562 64.87 90.39% 61.21% 0.00% 0
549 48.01 73.22% 22.04% 8.56% 47
521 45.75 78.31% 18.81% 5.37% 28
464 53.07 54.96% 30.39% 3.88% 18
459 54.14 43.14% 39.00% 3.05% 14
428 67.37 85.75% 50.23% 2.34% 10
394 54.80 71.32% 31.98% 5.58% 22
390 24.55 78.72% 76.67% 0.00% 0
384 53.00 49.48% 24.22% 5.99% 23
340 74.07 94.12% 75.29% 0.59% 2
322 67.06 78.88% 54.97% 1.86% 6
307 77.27 87.95% 52.12% 1.95% 6
302 64.99 94.04% 57.28% 0.00% 0
Observations
Article pages are terrible landing pages. When we compared this to newsletter signups, not much changed. Only one of the article
landing pages got 3 subscribers (last 4 weeks), others got none.
294 52.72 42.18% 22.45% 6.80% 20
Observations
Some product pages get paid traffic driven to them, but they don’t convert. Note that I have no information on actual ROI on ad
spend.
TOP 25 PPC Traffic Landing Pages Visits Avg. Time % New Vis Bounce R Ecommerc Transactions
688 55.80 69.91% 29.07% 2.76% 19
662 53.25 55.14% 11.78% 17.98% 119
548 47.03 1.28% 73.36% 0.18% 1
521 45.75 78.31% 18.81% 5.37% 28
340 74.07 94.12% 75.29% 0.59% 2
322 67.06 78.88% 54.97% 1.86% 6
288 49.22 42.01% 38.19% 2.78% 8
288 49.53 76.04% 35.07% 4.51% 13
255 42.30 92.94% 58.04% 0.00% 0
249 60.75 87.15% 66.67% 2.81% 7
247 50.35 64.37% 9.72% 16.60% 41
238 64.01 86.97% 58.82% 5.46% 13
190 68.79 89.47% 58.42% 2.11% 4
180 57.20 87.22% 68.89% 1.67% 3
166 50.71 76.51% 44.58% 7.83% 13
157 49.92 96.82% 56.05% 1.91% 3
152 37.11 89.47% 52.63% 5.92% 9
147 78.82 68.03% 45.58% 5.44% 8
130 48.93 90.00% 42.31% 9.23% 12
128 47.02 92.19% 64.84% 2.34% 3
125 97.80 84.00% 58.40% 3.20% 4
123 47.01 86.18% 53.66% 6.50% 8
122 74.02 87.70% 70.49% 0.82% 1
118 60.52 90.68% 55.08% 5.93% 7