When I first arrived at The Adventure Challenge, or 'TAC' as we called it internally; The Adventure Challenge presented tremendous opportunity for optimization and growth in its primary revenue stream. The DTC eCommerce site housed on Shopify grossed $200k per month in the off-season and close to $2M per month in Q4. With over 96% of its monthly 100K users on mobile devices, I took an app-inspired approach to redesigning the core interactive elements to improve the conversion funnel for sales efforts within their existing market.
Having been onboarded shortly after a period of rapid growth, I could see the potential in the diverse and talented team of individuals whose hearts were aligned with the company mission of inspiring human connection. However, it was clear there was a disconnect between what the users expected from a brand with such integrity and the website's dated and cold user experience. With the decrease in traffic from the post-pandemic era, it was critical that we focus on efficiency and not losing a single customer due to our most important touch point.
The audit of the user journey was conducted using a set of surveys, user session playback, heat maps, and funnel analysis. The data we collected would provide a clear roadmap to improve the user experience and increase conversions. I decided on a phased approach that would allow us to implement changes in realtime to observe impact to make agile iterations. One of the biggest areas for improvement was the cart and checkout flow. We began there, and continued to improve the tailored dynamic shopping experience.
Before: The original navigation was built to support the initial line of products and it initially served its function well. That is, until the product line expanded 3-fold. The default flow was sending users to paginated collection pages - some of which had up to 9 subpages. This resulted in an increased drop-off rate as users progressed through the site. Users became frustrated trying to find the products they wanted right away and would give up.
After: The new app-inspired approach brought intuitive changes to the navigation, without breaking existing frameworks. By adding images to the menu item, quick product identification became possible - taking the place of a collection page and driving users directly to the product page. The top and bottom areas of the nav menu are fixed (sticky) for permanent access while the product menu is scrollable to support a scaling catalog.
Before: The original cart was barebones and utilitarian. It lacked personality and neglected to capitalize on basic known shopping psychology of customers. Most importantly it failed to capitalize on the upside of an empty cart, which is the desire to fill it.
After: Conducting research on roughly 50K users, and watching hours of recordings, a number of new 'quality of life' upgrades where made to the interface of the cart. A simple close button and an easy way to identify the number of items in a cart were both added as were basic functionality features. The remaining major upgrades included solutions for marketing and CX which could be served in the cart. A gamified unlockable free shipping bar was added to increase AOV. A suggested bestseller collection link and category based cards were integrated to reduce abandoned carts.
Before: As observed in the user testing and recordings, many people were having difficulties managing their cart. They would often add and remove items trying to get the prices, discounts, or bundles they expected at checkout based on the marketing messaging they received. Additionally, customers regularly missed the discount code field buried at the last step of the checkout process and necessary product add-ons were not made clear - which would result in disappointed customers.
After: With learnings in hand, the cart was updated to be dynamic to make subtotals and savings visible in the cart as users shopped, so users would no longer have to wait until checkout to see them. We also added the ability to alter item quantity and remove items from within the sidecart. A clear discount message was now ever-present throughout the shopping experience to give shoppers peace of mind that the discounts would be shown later in the process which further improved cart abandonment.
Over 85% of traffic arriving on PDPs came directly from high CTR ad sources, but the site yielded less than a 3% average CVR which suggested something deeper was going on within the website. Monitoring user behaviors, using heat maps, flow tracking, and recordings revealed two primary causes for the low CVR.
Reason 1: Users were simply not understanding what the product was and therefore missing the value.
Reason 2: A cold and transactional landing page left many customers window shopping and hesitant to trust that their transaction was even safe.
Before: The default theme had an image carousel that occupied too much screen real estate and did little to explain what the product actually was or what was included for the price. The product description was hidden in a vague truncated toggle area that less than 6% of users would interact with. And too many bundle options created option-paralysis, resulting in users going back and forth adding a bundle and removing it from the cart.
After: By adjusting the aspect ratio of the image carousel, making it full-width, additional real estate introduced the product above the fold. Not just the product title, but the core value proposition as well as A/B tested USPs buyer assurances were now ever present when a user landed on a product page. The important copy formerly hidden in a toggle, is now featured as the product page body content - essentially treating every product page as a potential landing page, since the majority of traffic would land directly on the PDP.
After spending time in the analytics focused on CVR, I recognized that Shopify's metrics were including all pages on the site, including the support pages needed by the CX team which would see an immense amount of traffic but yielded zero conversions. This was driving our perceivable CVR down and clouding the accuracy of our KPIs. A separate hosted site dedicated specifically for CX needs was created so support pages could be migrated off the Shopify platform and remove the burden for constant Web/Dev support and upkeep. This recommendation also included a new standardized approach for product launches which included a dedicated support page for each new release in our catalog. The resulting impact was a drastic reduction in redundant CX tickets and a more accurately reported CVR.
Click to enlarge
