Online home, garden and DIY retailer vidaXL continues to grow rapidly in a highly competitive market. This makes customer-centric, data-driven optimisation critical across all of the brand’s ecommerce sites, which serve around 2.5 million customers each year.
About vidaXL
Online home, garden and DIY retailer
Operating in 29 countries
Head office in Venlo, Netherlands
Founded in 2006
Goals
Improve performance and delight users
Approach
Established a research-driven user experience strategy
Began conducting between three and five A/B tests per week
Results
Increased returning visitors’ conversion rate by 10%
Boosted number of returning visitors by 18%
To understand consumers’ behaviour on vidaXL’s websites and make informed decisions about site improvements, the company hired a conversion rate optimisation specialist and then assembled a dedicated team to focus on site optimisations. The team began A/B testing and now runs between three and five tests per week. In addition, they employ user tests, heat maps and session recordings in the testing strategy.
As their very first test, vidaXL experimented with removing the shipping cost calculator from the product page of the Australian site. This resulted in a 40% increase in products being added to the cart. Bolstered by early results such as these, vidaXL doubled down on further improvements, partnering with Google to gather insights on further hypotheses to validate. Here are a few examples.
“This allows us to always be on top of our customer’s behaviour, their needs and frustration points.”
– Esther van der Kaaij, Webshop Manager, vidaXL
Add-to-cart test
vidaXL started with a very straightforward change that perfectly illustrates how small changes can have significant results. On the product detail page, the add-to-cart button was enlarged to reach the full width of the page. This size increase led to a 6% increase in products being added to the cart. The results were particularly significant on mobile, demonstrating that size really does matter on smaller screens.
Password test
In a test that was conducted based upon industry best practise and advice, vidaXL saw some surprising results on their German website with regards to password input. The second password field was removed and replaced with an option to show or hide the password in the first input field instead. This change led to a significant drop in the amount of customers moving to the second step in the checkout funnel (2%).
Search term test
Allowing customers to remove a search keyword by displaying an “X” next to the search term led to a 2.5% decrease in exit rate and a 4% increase in visits to a product page. This change made it easier for customers to see the full range within a category whilst performing a search, without having to switch their navigation strategy from search to category browsing.
vidaXL’s use of A/B testing doesn’t begin and end with tweaking the user experience, however. In fact it’s the basis for gathering evidence to build business cases and allocate resources for major new projects affecting the entire user interface and overall online experience.
For instance, as a pure online player vidaXL is continuously improving delivery processes. However, implementing a new channel for order fulfilment is costly and time consuming. So instead of implementing parcel shop deliveries in a number of countries at once, vidaXL conducted a test on their French and German sites, offering the option for parcel shop delivery and adding a popup explaining why the feature wasn’t live yet. Based upon customers’ checkout behaviour, the team estimated that return on investment would take 10 times longer in the one country than the other.
Today, testing is firmly built into vidaXL way of doing business. With the conversion rate for returning visitors having increased by 10% and the number of returning visitors up by 18% year over year, the test-and-learn approach is clearly paying off. Optimising for conversion rate and user experience has laid a solid foundation for future developments, such as a new online furniture shop built on progressive web app (PWA) technology.
