The Company
Watches2U is the largest online watch retailers in the United Kingdom operating since 2002. With £1,000,000’s worth of stock across several warehouses, they become the official dealer for the world biggest and most reputable brands.
Challenges
Their biggest challenge was addressing their visitors uncertainty about buying brand watches online. The ecommerce world is flooded with fake watches and it’s a source of anxiety for many visitors. Many of them were scared to buy their products because they were worried they may not be 100% authentic.
Their online store was optimized for mobile but it had many user experience and usability issues that made product discovery very difficult on mobile devices. Customers had many challenges using their category filters and with over 7,500 watches, it became almost impossible to find the ideal watches on mobile.
The other issue was their multi-step checkout process. They require customer registration and didn’t provide guest checkout so many first-time customers had to jump thru many hoops to be able to purchase.
Our Solution
We created an extensive Ecommerce Audit analyzing their customer behavior, uncertainty, and purchase triggers. It uncovered issues on almost every step of the conversion funnel and the collected customer insights helped us create implementations to optimize their store for the upcoming shopping season.
The starting point was improving product discovery and modified their category filters. Watches have many different attributes that make filtering options very complex. The original implementation wasn’t optimized by usage data and showed filters alphabetically.
We sorted filters by the number of people using them, showed the most popular values first and rebuild the user interface. It resulted in 39.1% increase in filter usage and 15.7% increase in product page visits.
Product pages didn’t provide any authority elements and didn’t address customer concerns about product authenticity. We tested different variations of authority badges, social proof, and urgency triggers to identify the best implementation.
It helped their customers build trust with their store and the combination with FOMO (fear of missing out) delivered the much-needed shift in their purchase behavior. It resulted in 24.4% growth in add to cart and 9.5% increase in transactions.
They can’t have guest checkout for internal reasons so we needed to find a way to make it feel like a part of the actual checkout. We used a combination of a progress bar and user interface improvements to make the registration page look like the first part of the checkout process.
It helped their customers to get started with their checkout resulted in 14.9% improvement in checkout conversion rate.
The Results
The complete optimization including implementation of 50+ “quick wins” resulted in 27.1% growth of sales and reduced customer acquisition costs by 15.7%.
