Optimising the checkout funnel for Clever Cards for the Christmas sales season

I was working as Head of UX in Clever Cards in 2014 - 2015. CleverCards was a  B2C start up, which sold personalised cards. We released an e-Commerce website in November 2014, selling personalized cards and calendars, perfect timing for the Christmas market.  We were running great value promotion offers but the sales were lower than expected.  My goal was to identify if there were any experience issues preventing people from converting and to ensure there were addressed in time for Christmas season.

The Approach

Discovery to identify issues 

It was imperative our funnel was optimized fully but with limited time, fast and key decisions needed to be made on what would make immediate improvements. 

  • I scheduled a round of QA testing to find any bugs that may be hindering conversion.

  • I reviewed the funnels for both card flow and the calendar flow to look for areas of high drop out.

  • I ran some quick user testing for qualitative feedback.

  • I reviewed reports from customer service to see if there was trends in the issues users reported.

Prioritisation of issues  

Within two days I had a backlog of over 100 issues the team could fix. With only a few weeks left of the Christmas selling period, the prioritization of the issues were key. We prioritized the issues by size of reach, the level of impact we thought they would have and the effort they would take to do.

  • The areas we decided to focus on were:

  • Ensuring users can find the cards they want by improving bugs with the card filtering

  • Clearer navigation in the calendar flow

  • Ensure the users were clearly aware of the savings that were on offer

  • Better communication on where cards are printed and how long it takes to get delivered

THE DELIVERABLES

  • A bug free card filtering experience

  • Savings clearly communicated throughout calendar and card flow and on the shopping cart page

  • Clearer UI for the handing of the promotion code  

  • Reassurance with friendly notes about how customers can contact if they have any issues, that we print locally and when they can expect to have the items delivered by.

THE PROJECT RESULTS

The card funnel was converting at 1.03% and as increased to 3.76%. That was a 377% improvement from two weeks of development effort.

The calendar funnel for new users was converting at 1.00% over a 7 day period.We increased it to 2.9% for new users internationally and 11.00% for Irish users. (Due to CleverCards being an Irish business the Irish user base has always been performing stronger)