Case Studies: Chapter 9 – A Fashion Retailer’s Gift Box Options
How a luxury fashion retailer improved their new gift packaging options post-launch
As we just said, the faster you release as a Product team, the quicker you want to scan the new experience for any unexpected signs of struggle. Your early customers on the new experience are not guinea pigs, but they can still help you course correct the experience for all users that follow. This case study is an example of that.
The Challenge
The product team at this luxury brand just released a new checkout experience, including new options for gift packaging. Customers could choose between an environmentally friendly, standard packaging option and one that is extra deluxe. Both are free. What’s not to love?
Illustration: New gift experience at the luxury brand
The new checkout was launched and performed fine. If it had any major issue, you’d notice it immediately by just trying it. Instead, it’s the unexpected small pockets of friction that tend to fly under the radar. So how does the Product team know whether any frustrations slipped through the cracks?
Step 1: Scan the new experience with automated frustration scoring
These days, many of the high-end Experience Analytics products provide some version of automated digital experience scoring. It helps surface the sessions, pages, and journeys where customers show signs of struggle.
When the retailer in our case study scanned their new checkout experience, the frustration score automatically detected multiple interactions with the options for choosing between the two gift wrapping alternatives.
Image: An Opportunity Report based on frustration scoring shows issues on the shipping page during checkout, along with lost conversions.
Step 2: Understand what’s causing frustrations
To understand what is behind the frustrations, the retail brand in the case study drilled down into in-page analytics and session replays. In-page, we see a high click recurrence on the gift options.
Definition: Click recurrence
The average number of times a zone is clicked during a pageview. This metric measures engagement and frustration depending on the context.
Illustration: Click recurrence metric shows more than two clicks per customer on average on each gift packaging option
Watching the replays with high frustration scores, it became clear that customers hesitated over the two gift packaging options. The replays show them clicking back and forth multiple times.
Studying these replays and speaking with test users about this aspect of the experience, it turned out that customers are confused about whether both of the packaging options are free. It seems too good to be true that the deluxe version is also free.
Step 3: Quantify the impact of the hesitation
Seeing their customers hesitate and be confused makes it easy to empathize with them. But before prioritizing a fix for this issue over other areas that they could be improving, the Product team needs to quantify how often this issue is happening and whether it impacts business.
For that purpose, the Product team ran an impact quantification analysis that contrasted the conversion rate for customers that experienced multiple interactions with the gift packaging options vs. others that didn’t. Multiplied by traffic volume and average transaction basket size gives us the revenue at stake.
In this case, the problem impacted the conversion rate by 8%, causing a loss of over 40,000 GBP per month.
Step 4: Fix the issue and stop the leak
The retailer tested a fix for the issue by moving the word “Free” to both individual gift packaging options. This way, it is evident that both are free.
Illustration: Enhanced experience clarifying that both options are free
Rescanning their course-corrected version with frustration scoring, they confirmed that the fix was indeed successful. No more multiple interactions, and the overall conversion rate increased as expected.
The moral of the story
Nobody is perfect. What distinguishes winners from losers is the ability to double-check your work and quickly course-correct where needed.
In this case, who would have thought that cluttering the page by repeating the word “Free” twice is the better user experience? But customers showed through their behavior that it is.