We Had Two Months to Prove our E-Commerce Product Could Succeed
Here’s how we doubled our conversion rate before the deadline.
One of our newer products at Snapcommerce is called SuperShop. SuperShop uses AI-driven intelligence and personalized pricing in order to help customers find the best deals on a range of products. Our team was responsible for building SuperShop from the ground up (Mohamed was the product lead and Leon was the engineering manager).
The problem: We had a limited amount of time to prove that the storefront we were building could reach the target conversion rate. If we didn’t, the alternative would be to use a generic theme or template for the storefront. We had already spent a few months trying to improve conversion before this, and now we faced a hard deadline of two months.
How could Product and Engineering work together to solve this problem efficiently? The answer was a combination of team alignment and product experimentation, including:
- Aligning metrics and goals as a team
- Improving team updates and feedback
- Roadmapping and prioritizing missing features
- Analyzing user data for conversion insights
- Testing product updates to improve conversion
With these strategies, we surpassed our target and doubled SuperShop’s conversion rate ahead of our deadline. Here’s how they worked.
Aligning Metrics and Goals
We decided our North Star metric was going to be improving SuperShops purchase conversion, specifically defining it as the number of customers that made a purchase after viewing any product on SuperShop. We did this for two reasons:
- We knew what our conversion had to be to make SuperShop a profitable business, based on existing and forecasted business goals, as well as our customer acquisition channels
- We had a benchmark on the conversion rate of a themed storefront, the alternate option if our conversion rate didn’t improve
We had other secondary metrics that we used to make sure we were on the right track, including:
- How many users added an item to cart
- Actions completed before making a purchase
- The conversion rate and drop-off of a user checking out with a product in their cart
- Conversion rate by device type (mobile vs desktop)
Improving Team Workflow
Each week we reviewed our tasks and priorities to make sure every single one contributed to our main objective. As a team, we went from a 2-week sprint to a 1-week sprint, which allowed us to be more agile and efficient, and to pivot as we collected new data. Working this way freed up time, because if a goal stopped contributing to our objective, it would be replaced with another that did.
Feedback between Product and Engineering was also very important. We wanted to evaluate our progress and remove any roadblocks that might be in the way. With regular communication, we were quickly able to spot problem areas and unblock each other’s work. For example, when development of a feature took longer than estimated, we knew about it sooner and were able to adapt quickly.
What helped us most was establishing a team culture where we encouraged asking one another questions when we got stuck instead of trying to fix things alone. We also added pair programming to improve code quality. To reinforce this culture, we gave shout-outs in all-hands every week to team members exemplifying this behavior.
Roadmapping Missing Features
We needed a roadmap for the missing product features, and since our goals were clearly defined, we were able to easily prioritize the top features to add.
We knew we had a large gap to close, so we only implemented larger effect size experiments: features that we estimated would improve conversion by 20% or more. If a feature was expected to improve conversion by 1%, it was deprioritized.
We also dedicated more time to each feature’s quality and focused on engineering velocity rather than speed. That meant we’d rather take an extra day and make sure a feature was built right the first time, as opposed to rushing a feature, realizing we introduced a bug, and spending cumulatively more time fixing it.
Here’s a list of features we said yes to:
- Improving how users select product variations
- Multi-quantity support
- Improving how users navigate between pages
- Highlighting the savings for our customers and the value propositions of purchasing through SuperShop
- Making it easier to add items to cart and adding a “Buy Now” button that enabled people to make immediate purchases
- Improving the shopping cart pages (e.g., general style, making it easier to check out, showing the accepted payment methods)
Another important reason we were able to move so quickly was because we deprioritized a bunch of features. Here’s a partial list of features we deprioritized for later:
- Improving our search pages, because most users came with the intent of purchasing a specific product
- Features that increase the order value, such as product recommendations, warranties, and additional upsell
- Features that increase user retention
- Improvement to specific categories of products (e.g., clothing, refurbished goods, digital goods), instead we opted for a generic product page that would work across the board
Analyzing User Data
At the start, our team wasn’t sure which areas of SuperShop to improve in order to increase conversions. We began to tackle this by collecting as much data as possible about our user funnels.
We started by asking all the questions we wanted to answer and identifying the data required to answer them. This ended up being quite a large list, so we prioritized this list even further and only collected data that we needed, adding leading indicators if we needed to add more analytics in the future.
Using Amplitude as our main data visualization tool, we created a dashboard for each step in the funnel (product detail page, cart page, checkout process), by different devices, and other dimensions.
Analyzing the data revealed the largest customer drop-off occurred between a customer viewing a specific product and adding the item to their cart. The second biggest area of drop-off was between reviewing the cart and checking out. We supplemented our quantitative data by reviewing recorded customer sessions through Hotjar and speaking with our customers through user interviews.
Testing Conversion Improvements
To guarantee that we could try as many experiments as possible to find the best solution, we had production deployments several times a week. That meant features were released quickly and we could gather data immediately. Though we wanted to deploy often, we stuck to our strict quality standards, since extra bugs could easily set us back.
To improve the product pages, we ran A/B tests to see which pages performed better. In the photos below, you can see how the product pages looked before and after our work, in which we removed a floating Add to Cart button, added a footer with a dedicated Add to Cart and Buy Now button, and highlighted price and savings.
We also worked on improving the shopping cart summary page. Some things that improved conversions there were:
- Highlighting the total savings the customer was getting
- Reiterating the benefits of purchasing with SuperShop (the free shipping and low prices)
- Optimizing button placement to make it easier for customers to check out
Another area we were able to improve on was the product variation selection. Our modifications resulted in a 20% increase to purchase conversion. The modifications included:
- Clarifying customer selections on products so they knew what they were buying right away
- Updating product photos based on their selections so they could better visualize their purchase
With all of these activities combined, we learned that:
- Improving the product page increased conversions by 25%
- Users paid close attention to product prices, so keeping the price sticky on the screen helped the user stay aware of a low price
- Highlighting the benefits of purchasing with SuperShop, such as lower prices, free shipping, and returns, encouraged users to shop with us more
What We Learned
There was no single feature or improvement that led to surpassing our target rate and doubling our purchase conversion. Rather it was a combination of features, and the aligned mindset of our team, that made the project a success. More importantly, both the product and engineering leads were always on the same page, with the same goal in mind.
This is why it’s so important to take the time up front to plan with your team, not just your goals, but the workflow as well. We were able to easily prioritize our work and complete it quickly because we were all aligned. That also allowed us the time to experiment and find the solutions to our storefront’s conversion rate.
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