Success Story: Repositioning Product Recommendations

Product recommendations have been shown to improve adds to cart, purchases, revenue, engagement, and customer satisfaction. They help customers find what they’re looking for, give them ideas for additional products, and help replicate the personal in-store experience. However, they are only effective if customers see them at the right time. This outdoor clothing and gear retailer used SiteSpect to A/B test the placement of product recommendations on their basket page and found it made a big difference in conversions.

Placing Product Recommendations for Engagement

In the control variation of this A/B test, product recommendations sat on the basket page but below the fold. This was the result of a previous successful basket page redesign experiment. In the control a user would see the items in their basket, a sidebar with order summary and price total, and then a lot of blank space before the product recommendations module. The team hypothesised that its position meant lots of users missed the product recommendations and that this was detrimental to engagement and basket value. The experiment variation moved the product recommendations module directly underneath items in the basket increasing their visibility.

Results

This simple repositioning had a massive impact and proved the hypothesis to be true. The new positioning saw engagement with product recommendations increase by over 50%, and revenue per user increased by almost 4%. The team is now considering the placement of product recommendations across the site by device to ensure they are appropriately positioned in all scenarios.

The result also emphasized the importance of revisiting and iterating on previous successful experiments. A positive result is never the final result and further refinement is almost always possible. In this case additional opportunity for improvement was identified in a previous experiment though different segments of users by device. But there is also great value in considering other segments such as geo-location, operating system, browser, new vs return, guest vs logged in, channel, previous behavior and much more.

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