Extensive Website Testing Helps Wayfair Grow Online Sales

Challenge

Wayfair needed a way to test every change on its site to understand what motivates shoppers to purchase.

Solution

SiteSpect’s comprehensive digital optimization platform enables Wayfair to optimize the entire user experience and significantly improve conversion rates, revenue, and retention.

Results

The online retailer’s data-driven approach has helped it grow its online sales 425% in the past five years – from $251 million in 2009 to $1.32 billion in 2014.

Wayfair offers a zillion things home – the largest selection of home furnishings and décor across all styles and price points. With an unparalleled selection of more than seven million home items from more than 7,000 suppliers, Wayfair helps people find the perfect product at the right price through tailored shopping experiences across its brand portfolio.

To help improve the online user experience, the home furnishings e-retailer tests every change it makes to its site, usually running 15 to 25 tests a month. And that testing has proved lucrative: the retailer’s data-driven approach has helped the company grow its online sales 425% in the past five years – from $251 million in 2009 to $1.32 billion in 2014. You never know what changes on a website will boost sales. “We see interesting and surprising results every day that help us improve our site,” says Anthony Rindone, Manager of A/B Testing and Analytics at Wayfair. That’s because his group is running testing for many different departments in the company, including the product management, marketing, acquisition, conversion, retention, pricing, and merchandising teams. “With our growth and global expansion, we’ve increased testing from just Wayfair.com to include all of our brands across the world,” Rindone said.

The retailer’s A/B and multivariate tests uncovered that some simple tweaks, such as changing the order that information is listed on Wayfair.com’s product pages, can create big results. Other more pronounced changes, like a complete page redesign that the retailer had high hopes for, failed to produce gains, and in some cases those sorts of changes led to a drop in the site’s conversion rate.

To help determine what changes actually move the sales needle, Wayfair turned to SiteSpect to help it test nearly every change it makes to its site. That amounts to the retailer running between 15 and 25 different A/B and multivariate tests a month. “We’ve used testing to help drive product decisions and deliver the best user experience possible,” Rindone said. “We want to know that a new experience is better than the former experience, and testing allow us to identify what’s working or not working – and often, we’re proven wrong! That’s great because it allows us to constantly revise and optimize our site in areas we couldn’t without SiteSpect.”

“Only SiteSpect enables you to test every part of your site, from its look and feel to features and functionality,” says SiteSpect Founder and CEO, Eric J. Hansen. “Companies that want to advance their optimization culture, such as Wayfair, and run more tests in less time rely on our comprehensive digital optimization platform. And in doing so, they’re creating measurable wins for all of their teams and helping to lift key metrics such as conversion rates and revenue.”

Wayfair’s aggressive testing program also tries to find potential solutions to the areas on its sites that cause friction – not only to increase conversion and revenue, but also to improve retention. Rindone says that testing has allowed Wayfair to reduce customer churn and increase the recency, frequency, and monetary value of its visitors. “We’ve already surpassed where we were last year in terms of these goals,” Rindone said.

To improve the sites of its many brands around the world, Wayfair’s optimization program has become more sophisticated over time. “We’ve gone from basic funnel tests on the homepage, product grids, and checkout to segmenting our audiences and running targeted tests to variety of brand-new pages and different page types. We’ve really taken our testing to a whole new level in the past year,” he said.

“SiteSpect allows us to organize and develop an effective testing portfolio for all our sites and brands,” he mentioned. “Implementing campaigns and targeting swim lanes at our scale can be difficult; however, having a platform like SiteSpect allows us to focus our resources on ideation and analysis, rather than test implementation.”

Rindone offered additional guidance on testing at scale. “One piece of advice I would give to anyone wanting to scale their testing program successfully is to make sure you identify a testing process and figure out ways to optimize that process, which will be different for every company depending on what its goals are, what size it is, and what industry it’s in. There’s no one-size-fits-all, and that’s great because it allows you agility and flexibility in testing that best meet your goals and needs,” he concluded.