49% Lift in Offline Purchase Rate

Helping website visitors decide drives in-store sales

The client wanted to use A/B testing to drive more offline sales from their brand website. There were two key challenges:

What should be tested? What are the user experience changes with the greatest potential to impact sales?
How can impact be measured? Site engagement measures (e.g. time spent, # pages viewed) aren’t equivalent to offline impact.

Client:

Brand

Website Goal:

Drive offline sales

KnowClick Insights

Test should focus on Product Listing Page A

We measured the impact of each website interaction on offline purchase. Visitors at Page A only purchased at 2/3 of their potential.

Help Page A visitors decide on a product

Visitors liked the product selection (Page A displayed a long list of products) but had difficulty deciding.

Reccomendations

Test a new product listing layout where only 3 products display (but with detailed information) to enable effective comparisons and decision-making.
Display 3 clearly differentiated products – one with the lowest price, one with the best ratings, and one with the most advanced features.

Impact:

The test lifted offline purchase by 49%, equivalent to $23M in additional revenue per year.
Visitors rated product selection higher for the test! Ability to decide also increased.

FAQs

Would the recommendation to display fewer choices be applicable to most websites?

Partially. The “too many choices” problem most often occurs when products appear to be very similar and it is difficult to accurately compare the products.

When you have products that look similar and have similar specifications/user reviews, showing fewer by default is typically better.

However, for items like apparel, more choice is typically best as user preferences vary greatly and people can easily see what they like/don’t like.