How City Grounds Transformed Its Shopify Collection Pages To Get +34% Lift In RPV
REIMAGINING COLLECTION PAGES: every day, 90% of your visitors leave before finding a product of interest – unlock this untapped market with context-based personalization.
Finding just the right product
Conventional best practice for designing collection pages is all about filtering and sorting options that dictate product presentation and determines the pathway from the collection pages to the all-important product page.
Merchants are being advised to consider the following:
- Apply the right filters and a clear filtering interface so shoppers can narrow down a product list
- Enable a solid sorting feature allowing shoppers to list products by attributes they care about
- Develop a balanced product list designed to help shoppers evaluate products more effectively
Unfortunately this leads to a fundamentally flawed ‘one size fits all’ approach which greatly impedes shoppers’ product finding ability.
In the real world, shoppers expect delightful and tailored buying experiences and they don’t want to work hard to spend their money. Instead, they expect ecommerce sites to ‘auto-magically’ do the product discovery work for them.
Collection Pages Before
As visualized below, City Grounds collections pages look like any other collection pages on any other Shopify site.
The key feature of the pages is the set of filtering and sorting options needed to more easily discover a product of interest in a very large catalog of available products.
Desktop
Filtering options are fully exposed enabling filtering by bike type, color, size, or price point.
Mobile
Filtering options are hidden behind a Filter drop down – an extra step before being able to filter.
Actionable insights
Obviyo’s engagement analytics revealed a lot of friction with the filtering and sorting features during the product discovery experience.
Desktop Engagements
Mobile engagements
Collection Pages After
The ultimate driver of this initiative was a desire to create more effective landing pages for paid-search marketing.
The idea was to transform a limited list of top selling collection pages by replacing the conventional filter and sort grid layout with blocks of content that blend highly personalized product recommendations and branded lifestyle images.
Instead of expecting the shopper to filter-sort-find a product of interest, each block ‘auto-magically’ personalizes a list of products and adapts in real time to different audiences and product needs.
Lifestyle images are there to inspire buyers and to differentiate the offering.
Desktop
Mobile
Key factor in this transformation was Obviyo’s Growth Bots – micro-apps built to support product discovery scenarios using a blend of dynamic and editorial (branded) content.
Deploying Growth Bots to ecommerce pages is a breeze. For the most part, all merchants need do is stylize and customize the bots’ properties in the app’s visual editor.
Results and Insights
Since both the conventional collection pages and the new versions were in play at the same time, there was a unique opportunity to compare and analyze the results produced by two different types of collection pages.
Knowing that the makeup of visitor traffic is different for different pages, the paid search channel segment was analyzed and used as the common denominator for both collection page styles.
UNIQUE INSIGHTS
Personalization and use of blended content to inspire and differentiate offering on collection pages works.
Mobile shoppers are highly unlikely to use filters, sorting, navigation, or search – therefore, providing personalized direct access to products is the only way to create a viable mobile shopping experience.
REVENUE PER VISIT (RPV) ANALYSIS
Time frame: 4 weeks
All devices – All visitors:
OLD: $4.32
NEW: $5.89
DIFFERENCE: $1.49 (▲ 34%)
Desktop – Paid_Search:
OLD: $9.28
NEW: $11.99
DIFFERENCE: $2.71 (▲ 29%)
Mobile – Paid_Search:
OLD: $2.34
NEW: $11.79
DIFFERENCE: $9.45 (▲ 404%)
MERCHANT VALUE
Percentage of mobile shoppers continue to grow mandating better mobile shopping experience in general.
Making collection pages mobile shopper friendly is a new revenue growth opportunity for almost every ecommerce brand.
“Obviyo’s Growth Bots enable super easy way to combine highly personalized recommendations with lifestyle images and editorial content. Amazon’s machine learning algorithms are super powerful!”
– Jack KU,
Founder and COO, City Grounds
Next Steps
Growth marketing is a continuous improvement methodology where more data and insights stimulate more growth ‘hacks.’
This study has uncovered the value of replacing conventional filtering and sorting options with hyper personalized recommendations. In particular, it drives 5x higher revenue per visit (RPV) for ever growing cohort of mobile shoppers.
This approach should extend to all collection pages on the site.
However, this transformation should be done gradually and it should be done in a data driven way. Every component of this transformation should be tested to validate if it works across the entire visitor population, and not only for paid search as was the case in this study.
