The situation
Mellow Diamond sells luxury wigs across two main collections: ready-to-ship and made-to-order.
Although both carried a premium price tag, the made-to-order collection generated considerably more profit. That meant simply increasing the number of orders wasn’t enough. We needed to encourage more customers to buy without nudging them towards the less profitable ready-to-ship range or dragging down average order value.
Because more sales aren’t quite as exciting when they’re the wrong sales.
What we spotted
Customers browsing a collection had to visit individual product pages before they could add anything to their cart.
That added an unnecessary step, particularly for customers considering several styles. With premium products like these, choosing a wig isn’t always a quick “that one will do” decision. Customers are likely to compare different options before committing.
We believed the cart could become part of that comparison process.
The hypothesis
By allowing customers to add wigs directly from the collection page, we could make it easier for them to shortlist and compare their options.
This should encourage more add-to-carts and, ultimately, more completed purchases.
Because customers were already browsing either the ready-to-ship or made-to-order collection, we didn’t expect the change to shift demand towards the less profitable range. Still, “we don’t think it will” isn’t quite good enough when average order value is at stake, so we tested it.
The test
We added an add-to-cart option directly to the collection page, allowing customers to begin building their shortlist without opening every individual product page.
The existing experience remained as the control, while the new collection-page functionality was shown to the variant group.
The results
The test ended before it could reach full statistical significance, so these results should be treated as strong directional evidence rather than a definitive win.
However, the variant produced positive movement across every key commercial metric:
- 29.6% increase in add-to-cart rate, with a 98.7% probability of outperforming the control
- 51.4% increase in conversion rate, with a 95.8% probability of outperforming the control
- 8.2% increase in average order value, with a 77.8% probability of outperforming the control
- 62.7% increase in revenue per visitor, with a 97.7% probability of outperforming the control
Most importantly, the improvement didn’t come at the expense of order value.
Customers found it easier to move products into their cart, more of them went on to purchase, and average order value moved upwards rather than downwards.
A small shortcut on the collection page created a much easier buying journey and, based on the evidence collected, considerably more valuable visitors.
Graphic provided curtesy of: pch.vector