This is the first in our series of case studies - time to show you, we can talk the talk, but can we walk the walk? (TL;DR - yes we can).

  Every website is different, so of course the lessons learned can't be blindly applied to your website without - yep, you guessed it, thorough testing (can you tell we just love testing?). But it's good to get some ideas about what might not be working on your site, and how you can approach a solution.

THE PROBLEM

We were approached by a busy e-commerce website, who had significant traffic on their site, in part thanks to PPC advertising. This traffic, however, wasn't turning into sales - and so they needed our help. FABRIC8 to the rescue!

THE HYPOTHESIS

We did a little digging as to what the main causes of the low conversion rate might be - and came up with a key hypothesis of how we could generate a quick, yet lasting, turnaround. We found that when we searched for products, a huge amount of results were returned - many that weren't quite what we were looking for, and sorted in a haphazard way. We theorised that users were suffering from the paradox of choice, coupled with results that didn't allow them to filter out irrelevant products.

THE TEST

We split test the original search functionality against a new and improved search that generated fewer product results, but allowed users to refine these results in a meaningful way to increase the chances that they liked what they saw. We predicted that this would generate an uplift in conversions - were we correct?

THE RESULTS

Well, it wouldn't be a case study if we hadn't knocked it out of the park! As users saw better, more relevant results, their confidence and likelihood of purchasing soared - and so did the conversion rate, with a 70% increase. Pats on the back all round!