What you consider “easy to use” could be completely unintuitive for your audience. That’s why user research and identifying common behavior patterns is so important. Ease of use is about more than just clean layouts and fast load times; it’s about understanding human behavior and anticipating needs before users even realize them.

You can do exactly that by leveraging the ease heuristic. Ease is one of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization, a tool developed at The Good to theme common optimization issues and opportunities with the user at the center of analyses.

In this article, we’re sharing everything you need to know about the ease heuristic and how to leverage it to create a better website or app. Keep reading to learn:

• How the ease heuristic manifests
• How to identify when your website violates the ease heuristic
• Five ways to improve ease (with examples)

What is ease in UX?

The ease heuristic focuses on making a website, app, or digital product “easy to use.” It ensures users won’t abandon a digital property due to its complexity and offers better accessibility to diverse audiences. It includes aspects like information architecture, navigability, and seamless functionality.

Let’s check out these three pillars of ease in more detail.

What is information architecture?

Information architecture (IA) is the practice of structuring content on digital products (websites, apps) to make it easy for users to find and understand the information they need. It focuses on things like:

• Content grouping that is intuitive
• Navigation design to help users find what they need
• Labeling systems that are clear and consistent
• Search systems that find things efficiently

Effective information architecture enhances the overall user experience by reducing cognitive load, preventing user frustration, and ensuring that users can complete their tasks with ease.

What is navigability?

Navigability refers to the ease with which users can move through a website or application to find what they need (information, features, etc.). Key aspects include:

• Intuitive structure that follows a logical pattern
• Clear labels indicating current location and options for next steps
• Consistent design of uniform patterns to avoid re-learning
• Responsive elements with immediate feedback
• Accessible paths that accommodate all users

Good navigability of elements such as menus, links, buttons, and search bars increases satisfaction by minimizing the effort required to find information and complete tasks.

What is seamless functionality?

Seamless functionality refers to the uninterrupted operation of a digital product, where all features work together for a smooth user experience. Key characteristics include:

• Smooth interactions (clicking, scrolling, swiping) with minimal load time/delays
• Consistent website performance
• Error handling with feedback and recovery options
• Integrated features that update as needed
• User-friendly interfaces that don’t require extensive instructions or support.
• Optimized load times

Achieving seamless functionality ensures that users can accomplish their goals efficiently and without distraction.

How does violating the ease heuristic impact the user?

As mentioned, heuristics are tools used to identify optimization issues or opportunities. Information architecture, navigability, and seamless functionality work together to improve the “ease” of use on a website or app. But how does it impact a user when the ease heuristic is violated?

High Interaction Cost

Violating the ease heuristic can often come at a high interaction cost. For example, a task or interaction requires significant time/effort, creating frustration and resulting in abandonment.

Heavy Cognitive Load

Another way lack of ease impacts a user is by putting undue mental effort into accomplishing a task. This may cause analysis paralysis or frustration, leading to abandonment.

Content Fatigue

Excessive textual/visual content on the page can overwhelm users, hindering their ability to find relevant content for successful task completion.

Unclear System Status

If the interface doesn’t provide enough cues, semantics, or timely feedback to keep users informed, the system status is unclear. This results in stress, uncertainty, and likely abandonment.

Identifying opportunities with user research

If you want to understand where and when your website violates the ease heuristic, the best way is with user research.

While patterns related to violation of the ease heuristic can appear in plenty of user research methods, such as heatmaps, user testing, etc., here are a few examples of how they might specifically show up in session recordings or observational analysis.

• Halted scrolling: The user pauses on the site to possibly engage with content/reorient themselves, which could imply that the user perceives a false bottom. This indicates a heavy cognitive load.
• Hunting and Pecking: The user bounces around the site from page to page, sometimes back-navigating, looking for specific content without finding products of interest. This may indicate unclear system status.
• Scanning: Users scroll over content (text or images) at a higher scroll rate on mobile, while on desktop, they might hover over some words or phrases or completely skip over content altogether. This could indicate a high interaction cost.

Look for this behavior to identify violations of the ease heuristic. Then, you can prioritize opportunities to improve it for a better digital experience.

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Five ways to make it easy for users (with examples)

Once you know your website violates the ease heuristic and you have identified areas of opportunity, you can hypothesize and test improvements. Here are some ideas for increasing ease on your website.

1. Group products by attributes

When products are not intuitively grouped, users can experience decision paralysis or confusion. Grouping products by shared attributes can reduce frustration and support user wayfinding.

It is especially beneficial when a brand has a large selection of products, like mattress brand Casper.

2. Collapse or expand relevant dropdowns

Content hidden in accordions can cause users to miss critical information in a purchase decision, leading to frustration and abandonment.

Prioritizing relevant drop-downs by expanding them on PDP or category pages can help users better differentiate products and increase the likelihood of purchasing.

Note that it is sometimes necessary to bring in a copy expert to rewrite product copy entirely, focusing on decreasing cognitive load and increasing the user’s value.

3. Refine product grid layout

Users can become overwhelmed with product listings on category pages, especially if there are many SKUs or a large amount of content.

Refining category page layouts to be more scannable may improve shopper experience, easing product discovery and encouraging visits to PDPs.

Specifically, we’ve found success testing on mobile with a 2-up layout so users see more products when they land on a category page. We iterate on category page layouts based on test outcomes and look for opportunities to test things like CTA colors, language, and selector options within product grids.

4. Improve add-to-cart feedback

A lack of notification that a product has been successfully added to the cart can cause users to be unsure of the status, leading to frustration and cart abandonment.

Improving add-to-cart feedback guides users to checkout, increases purchase intention, and reduces uncertainty.

5. Increase the visibility of tooltips

Many tooltips can be hard to see or hidden on a page, which can lead to a lack of understanding and confidence.

Emphasizing tooltips can ease directional guidance and help users understand how a product functions or explain an element on the page in an unobtrusive way, which can lead to better understanding and increase confidence.

Common tooltip use cases include interactive walkthroughs, secondary onboarding, instructions, upsells, feature adoption, and new product updates.

Improving ease (and beyond) in digital experience optimization

Ease is only one of the six Heuristics for Digital Experience Optimization. These heuristics can guide your strategy and help you build digital journeys that feel familiar, do what they say, and function intuitively.

The six heuristics are:

1. Priming & Expectation Setting
2. Trust & Authority
3. Ease
4. Benefits & Unique Selling Points
5. Directional Guidance
6. Incentives

To learn more, or if you’d like our team to review your website for opportunities to improve based on these themes, get in touch.

The post What Is The Ease Heuristic? (And How To Leverage It To Improve UX) appeared first on The Good.

The competition for consumers’ attention and limited budgets extends beyond traditional retail rivalry with the rise of delivery apps, quick-service restaurants, and media platforms.

As a result, many consumers are experiencing subscription fatigue, causing them to reconsider their spending habits and prioritize where their hard-earned dollars go.

To thrive in this competitive environment and counteract subscription fatigue, businesses must employ innovative strategies that captivate consumers and compel them to subscribe.

Our article presents 7 strategies to help your business increase subscriptions and reignite AOV (average order value).

Understanding subscription-based business models

To address various subscription-based models, we’re going to first explore and clarify how companies use subscription models across diverse industries.

What are subscriptions?

Subscriptions are recurring agreements or payments made by customers to access and receive products, services, or content. Many industries use subscription-based business models, each catering to different customer needs.

What is subscription-based ecommerce?

Subscription-based ecommerce uses recurring subscriptions to provide a seamless shopping experience.

Companies like Stitch Fix, an online personal styling service, deliver curated clothing and accessories to their subscribers.

Customers take a style quiz, and based on this information, professional stylists handpick a personalized wardrobe which is shipped to the subscriber’s doorstep either monthly or quarterly.

Digital subscription-based businesses

Along with ecommerce subscription models, subscriptions are also popular in the digital and SaaS (software-as-a-service) sectors, where companies provide ongoing access to digital tools, software, or platforms for a regular fee.

We’re surrounded by digital subscription-based models through streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and others which offer access to a vast library of content for a monthly or annual subscription fee.

Benefits of selling subscriptions online

A subscription business model offers a personalized experience for customers while providing businesses with predictable revenue streams and an opportunity to foster long-term relationships.

Let’s review some benefits that businesses see when they sell subscriptions.

Enhanced customer loyalty and satisfaction

Subscription services can gather customer insights and data, enabling companies to understand and address customer preferences. 

And this matters because research from Epsilon indicates that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.

Knowing your customers can help you tailor your offerings proactively, provide relevant recommendations, and exceed customer expectations, reducing the likelihood of that dreaded customer churn.

Increased customer lifetime value (CLTV)

CLTV is one of the most important subscription metrics because it helps companies determine and measure the lifetime value of their customers (how much your company can expect from a single customer throughout the business relationship).

Depending on various studies, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.

Subscriptions increase CLV through recurring revenue over an extended period throughout a relationship with a customer. The longer a customer continues to purchase or subscribe, the larger the lifetime value is.

Improved customer retention

The overall churn rate for subscription services is only 5.57% compared to 6.77% for one-time purchases, indicating that loyal subscribers are more likely to stay engaged and continue their subscriptions.

Subscriptions encourage long-term customer relationships through recurring engagement and continuous value delivery.

Types of subscription services (with examples)

From subscription boxes, service access, subscribe and save services, recurring donations, and digital product subscriptions, here are some types of subscription services and examples of brands that have perfected the subscription model.

Subscription boxes

A great example of an ecommerce subscription service, subscription boxes are curated packages of products or samples that are delivered to subscribers on a recurring basis, typically monthly.

These boxes often cater to a particular customer’s need, personalizing the experience. Packages can be themed (like snack items) or different types of the same product (like dresses).

TryTheWorld offers a subscription-based gourmet food box service. The company curates boxes filled with authentic food products from different countries worldwide every month.

Subscribers can explore the tastes of different cultures without leaving their homes.

Membership and digital subscription services

For membership and digital subscription services, customers pay a recurring fee to gain ongoing access to online or offline products, services, or exclusive benefits.

Some membership services offer exclusive access to a company’s blog or resources page. Others offer video courses or lessons to subscription members.

Amazon is a prime example of this. Amazon Prime offers customers a paid membership program with various benefits and exclusive services.

Subscribers pay a monthly or yearly fee to access tons of key features like free and fast shipping on eligible items, unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows through Prime Video, access to Prime Music, Prime Reading with a selection of ebooks and magazines, and exclusive deals and discounts during events like Prime Day.

Subscribe and save subscriptions

“Subscribe and Save” is a program offered by various online retailers and allows customers to set up recurring deliveries of certain products at discounted prices.

With Subscribe and Save, customers can choose from eligible items and select their desired delivery frequency, such as monthly subscriptions.

This gives your customers the convenience of automatic deliveries without the need to reorder every time. It also provides the brand with more predictable revenue.

Customers often receive a discounted price on the items (like 5% off for subscribing), making it an attractive option for regularly consumed or replenished products such as household essentials, personal care items, pet supplies, and more.

Chewy offers an Autoship program where customers set up pet supplies to be delivered monthly.

Recurring donation subscriptions

Nonprofits or charities can set up a recurring donation option for their customers.

A recurring donation subscription is where individual customers or organizations commit to regular, ongoing donations to a specific cause or organization.

Recurring donation subscriptions provide stability and predictability for nonprofits.

Donorbox is specifically designed for nonprofit organizations to accept online donations. It offers features that allow nonprofits to set up recurring donation options.

7 Strategies to increase subscriptions

No matter your subscription service model, there are always ways to attract potential customers and onboard new ones.

With the competition for consumers’ attention, you’ll need to clarify your value to your audience with these expert strategies.

Strategy 1: Upsell your annual plan or cross-sell bundles

While pushing price increases on your services might scare away customers, you can do it without jeopardizing customer loyalty. Instead, offer incentives like annual plan subscriptions, advanced features, additional products, or one-time products.

Longer plan options provide the company with stable and predictable revenue over an extended period. Additionally, they also offer subscribers the advantage of reduced costs in exchange for a longer commitment.

The strategy: Point to upgrade opportunities

Remind subscribers why they should upgrade to a longer-term plan or add more products to their subscription boxes.

Offer discounts like 10% off the annual plan by clearly calling it out on your pricing page. You can also email monthly subscribers encouraging them to upgrade and save immediately or try to cross-sell complementary products.

Squarespace offers an annual/monthly toggle so customers can see the price difference. They also show how much customers save on each plan by highlighting percentages.

Strategy 2: Identify where customers churn

Net revenue retention (NRR) measures the overall revenue generated from existing customers over a specific period, accounting for any revenue lost due to churn (customer attrition) and any revenue gained from upsells or expansions.

By improving NRR, subscription-based ecommerce companies can mitigate the negative impact of churn on their revenue and uncover new avenues for growth.

The strategy: Map the buying process

Identify patterns in where customers drop off and voluntary or involuntary churn. You can do this by mapping your average customer lifetime from when they hit subscribe to where they churn.

This way, you can find opportunities to win them back before they churn by sending discounts through email or in-app pop-ups.

Strategy 3: Offer more than one subscription product or service

Recurly, a subscription management platform, found that 70.4% of businesses offer more than one subscription or service. For example, a subscription pet box service might offer boxes for both dogs and cats.

Offering additional subscriptions can grow your revenue and provide additional value to your customer base.

The strategy: Curate additional options

Total Payment Volume (TPV) is the total value of transactions processed or payments made within a period.

Recurly also found that ecommerce subscription businesses selling physical products benefit from curated goods that boost their TPV, like a Box of the Month.

Caption: Box of the Month subscriptions have very high TPV.

If you offer physical goods with your subscription, consider curating additional subscription options like exclusive collaborations with popular brands or limited-edition product releases.

This increases the perceived value of your subscription and creates a sense of excitement and exclusivity among your subscribers, driving them to make additional purchases and contributing to a higher TPV.

Strategy 4: Discourage downgrades

Downgrades occur when customers switch from higher-tier subscription plans to lower-tier plans, resulting in reduced revenue and potentially impacting profitability.

The strategy: Offer subscription pauses

Subscription pauses allow customers to temporarily suspend their subscriptions without canceling them completely. This option is particularly beneficial for customers who may be facing temporary financial constraints, lifestyle changes, or other circumstances that make it difficult for them to utilize the subscription benefits at the moment fully.

Clearly communicate the process, duration, and any associated fees or limitations to customers, ensuring transparency and managing expectations.

Source.

Allowing your customers to pause accommodates their needs. This can improve retention by building loyalty and reducing the likelihood of customer attrition.

Strategy 5: Enhance the product page user experience

When users land on a product page, the add-to-cart button should be easily identifiable and distinct from other elements, such as flavor options or additional CTAs. Then, users know exactly what primary action they need to take to proceed with their purchase.

The strategy: Refine the UI of the buy box area

This involves making the add-to-cart process more intuitive and removing any potential confusion. For example, the add-to-cart button should be clearly distinguishable from other elements.

For example, LyfeFuel shows a flavor pre-selected when the user arrives on the product page. Subscribe & save is shown as a toggle, limiting the amount of vertical space above the add to cart button.

Test this buy box area, analyzing user behavior through heatmaps and additional customer feedback to identify any hangups in the purchase process.

Strategy 6: Provide clearer visibility on subscription benefits

You can add layers to your add-to-cart experience by providing clearer feedback on the benefits of subscribing to your products or services.

The strategy: Offer incentives and detailed information

When users switch from a one-time purchase to a subscription mode or vice versa, consider adding details of the benefits of upgrading.

Since the user chose to subscribe, this provides additional benefits on why they made a good choice. Or, if they chose a one-time purchase, this shows why they need to take advantage of all the benefits.

Strategy 7: Improve the visibility of product details

When users land on a product page, they expect detailed information about the product without scrolling down the page.

The strategy: Update the above-the-fold-content on product pages

Above-the-fold designs often fail to match users’ expectations, creating frustration when locating product details.

For example, some businesses use thumbnail images and short descriptions above the fold to introduce the product. However, they only provide detailed information about the product further down the page.

Businesses can follow Oats Over Night, which uses elements such as product names and reviews to present each product page as an individual page.

While the page may also focus on getting users to subscribe to multiple products, the above-the-fold content still presents each product as a standalone item.

Test different layouts and content above the fold on your product pages to determine what works best for your users.

How to attract and retain subscribers

What business doesn’t want to attract and retain new customers? Here are some creative strategies to help fuel your company’s subscription growth: 

• Content marketing: Create informative and engaging content to attract and educate potential customers. Provide tips and industry knowledge through blog posts, articles, and videos. This will establish your brand as an authority and capture leads. Check out resources like Content Marketing by Kaleigh Moore for expert advice on using content marketing effectively.
• Post-purchase offers: Maximize customer engagement and retention by providing post-purchase offers. This encourages customers to return for repeat purchases and increases their lifetime value. Explore our insights on post-purchase offers to learn more about how to implement this.
• Customer loyalty program: Foster long-term relationships with your customers by implementing a loyalty program. Rewarding loyal customers with exclusive discounts, personalized offers, and VIP benefits encourages repeat purchases. To help you optimize your program, read our additional insights on off-season loyalty program strategies.
• First-purchase anniversary gift: Show appreciation to your customers and celebrate their loyalty by offering a special gift on their first purchase anniversary. This creates a memorable experience and strengthens the bond with your customers. Learn more about discounting tactics.
• Special offers for specific groups: Tailor your offerings to specific customer segments such as teachers, students, or the military. Providing pro deals or exclusive discounts for these groups demonstrates your support and appreciation and helps you tap into other markets and expand your customer base.

The keys to subscription growth

The strategies we provide offer innovative approaches to captivate consumers and incentivize subscription adoption.

At The Good, we understand the importance of data-driven strategies to enhance subscription conversion rates. Our team of experts specializes in optimization and can help you implement these strategies.

Whether you need assistance refining your user interface, implementing personalized offers, or fine-tuning your post-purchase strategies, our team supports your subscription growth goals, no matter what they are. Contact us today to see how we can help you. 

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The post 7 Proven Strategies to Win Subscribers (Instead of One-time Purchasers) appeared first on The Good.

• Why competitor data is unreliable and inaccurate
• The value of studying your customers over your competitors
• Goal-setting, testing, and learning are better alternatives to benchmarks

“What is a good conversion rate?” is one of the most common questions we get from clients. In fact, it comes up once in nearly every project, as if there’s a mythical number that can be achieved with the right collection of strategies and techniques.

You’ve probably Googled something like, “What is a good conversion rate for auto parts ecommerce?” or similar. You want to know how to measure the success or failure of your optimization efforts. You’re looking for a growth ceiling, hoping to identify the version of your website that performs the best.

We don’t blame you for this line of thinking. Industry benchmarks are an obvious starting point for anyone looking to set goals. Unfortunately, comparing your conversion rate to the rates of other companies (or the industry as a whole) is meaningless.

We know you want to be data-driven, but simply having data and a goal isn’t enough. How you use that data is what separates a typical company from an exceptional one. And while we love a good goal, craving a singular, decontextualized benchmark is the opposite of organizational maturity.

In this article, we explain why comparing your conversion rate with industry averages and competitor data is impossible and unwise. Then, we give you some super smart alternatives to a typical conversion rate benchmark.

Understanding the Dynamic Nature of Conversion Rate

Most ecommerce store owners and managers ascribe to a particularly reductive view of conversion rate. They assume up is good and down is bad; up means more revenue, and down means less revenue. They toil to boost their conversion rate and fret when it falls. But this kind of thinking ignores the dynamic nature of a conversion rate.

Like many marketing metrics, the number on its own isn’t helpful. The number requires context. Any discussion of conversion rate should focus on the question, “Why?” Why did it change? Why is it good or bad for you? There are plenty of cases where a falling conversion rate could be the expected outcome of building your brand ecosystem.

For instance, suppose your brand sells through multiple sales channels, including your own website, Amazon, big box stores, and other brick-and-mortar retailers. You sell through those channels because the increased exposure creates higher revenue.

If you were to remove all of your products from those additional channels and only sell through your website, some customers would seek out your online store directly, but many wouldn’t. They would find a similar product that meets their needs wherever they prefer to shop. In this case, your site’s conversion rate would increase, but your overall revenue would fall.

Similarly, we can imagine a situation where a low conversion rate could help you meet your organization’s goals. A new brand, for instance, may not care about its conversion rate as it focuses on building awareness. They might purchase billboards, acquire social visits, and invest in other far-reaching but hard-to-track marketing endeavors. Countless ecommerce organizations care more about their share of voice than the percentage of users who convert into customers (at least for a while). They want an audience today that they will monetize tomorrow.

This makes conversion rate benchmarking particularly problematic. When you compare your conversion rate to your competitors, there’s no opportunity to explore the “Why?” There’s no way to pinpoint the causes of change. Your competitors operate in a completely different ecosystem with maturity and marketplace dynamics that make comparison meaningless.

Furthermore, conversion rate benchmarking implies that there’s a ceiling to be reached, a maximum point where your ecommerce site operates at peak performance. But who’s to say that any of your competitors have identified the peak? How can you be sure there isn’t room to grow beyond what anyone has achieved?

Imagine, for a moment, that you know – without a shadow of a doubt – the conversion rate average of your industry. You also know that your own conversion rate is higher. You win! No need for optimization, right? Of course not. Even if your conversion rate is higher than everyone else’s, you still want to push it higher. This means everyone else’s conversion rate is irrelevant for your purposes because you’ll strive to beat yourself anyway.

All in all, focusing on your competitor’s conversion rate (whether you’re looking at a single competitor or the aggregate of an industry or sector) isn’t helpful. In many cases, it’s actually a distraction. Yes, some competitive research is helpful, but it shouldn’t dictate your strategy.

In the next two sections, we’ll talk specifically about the limitations of benchmarking yourself against your competitors and your industry: lack of context and questionable accuracy.

Lack of Context: Contributing & Limiting Factors of Comparing Conversions Rates

One reason your competitors’ conversion rate metrics aren’t comparable is that they lack context. That context is affected by dozens of contributing and limiting variables, such as the differences between brands, their organizational maturity, acquisition strategy, product mix, and dozens of other factors. In fact, it only takes one difference to make comparison impossible.

Suppose your organization sells eyeglasses for smart professionals and high-income earners. Another eyeglass vendor offers affordable options targeted at young people and families. In this scenario, the different products, price points, and target audiences create such a difference between the two organizations that comparing conversion rates (or any metric, for that matter) is unhelpful. It’s like comparing apples to snow shoes. There are just too many uncontrolled variables.

The following is a list of many limiting and contributing factors that affect how your site converts. This might seem like an exhaustive list, but there’s even more to be considered (if you can believe it). You may identify factors that relate specifically to your products, audience, and business model. As you read each item, consider how your brand differs from your competitors.

Product

• Product features
• Price (including fees, shipping, etc.)
• Variations and options
• Expanding/shrinking product lines
• Audience target

Market conditions

• Appetite for the product / need variability
• Retail partnerships (partnerships, distribution deals, etc.)
• Competitors (number and type)
• Education around the need
• Brick and mortar availability
• Economic conditions

Acquisition strategy

• Referral program
• PPC spend and strategy
• Third party endorsements
• Unbranded keyword strategy
• Billboard strategy
• Social media presence
• Retargeting strategy
• Paid placements
• Partnerships

Traffic Quality

• Promotions (time and strategy)
• Email program (timing, list size, send frequency, etc.)
• Search engine discoverability (blog, SEO strategy, etc.)
• Brand awareness
• Word of mouth
• In-person (physical) visibility

Site content and efficiency

• Ease of decision-making (bundling, cost, etc.)
• Brand values alignment
• Product descriptions
• Popups and overlays
• Load time
• Ease of navigation
• Competitive differentiators
• Product discovery
• Proof in numbers
• Price to value
• In/out of stock products
• Site bugs, errors, and disruptors
• Social proof
• Shipping (speed of fulfillment, options, etc.)
• Confidence (guarantees, certifications, etc.)
• Ease of product selection
• Price point (in general and vs. competitors)
• Payment options
• Incentives
• Competitor advertising
• Third-party guarantees

Fulfillment

• Fulfillment timeline
• Order communications (post-purchase emails/texts, etc.)
• Unboxing experience
• Shipping partner execution
• Unforeseen weather
• Product quality and functionality
• Expectation-setting during pre-purchase
• Order accuracy
• Conflict resolution
• Surprise and delight
• Incentive to return to site

As you can imagine, those variables create distinct differences between you and your competitors, making comparison pointless. It’s best, therefore, to plan and execute a strategy without trying to imitate your competitors because you are different.

Questionable Accuracy: The Flaw of Self-Reporting Among Competitors

In order to compare your organization’s conversion rate to the conversion rate of another brand, you would first have to convince the other brand to release that data, either to you or some publication that combines it together as an industry average. This kind of self-reporting is rife with incorrect data.

First, your competitors have no incentive to offer accurate information. What’s to gain by releasing honest numbers? If their conversion rate appears high, it may convince the market that the ceiling is higher than expected, causing other brands to invest deeper into optimization. Ultimately, the reporting brand could lose sales.

Nor do brands want to report a conversion rate that’s too low, lest their stakeholders, investors, and even their employees lose faith in the organization. They don’t want people banging on their door, demanding to know why the company performs so poorly.

Besides, true conversion rates aren’t impressive numbers by any means. They are usually just a low, single digit. Without understanding what that really means in terms of revenue and in regards to site traffic, it’s easy for the uninformed to misidentify a good conversion rate as low performance.

Therefore, the true conversion rates of your competitors are usually kept hidden. Whatever they publicize is often a sanitized, public-friendly version that avoids causing any problems. In most cases, however, your competitors don’t publicize anything at all. When a publication surveys them for their performance metrics, brands typically refuse to answer.

What’s worse is that when some publications can’t obtain conversion data for the companies they want to report on, they resort to some obscure, ad hoc calculation to work it out for themselves. They’ll grab whatever data they can (such as revenue and site traffic volume), make some assumptions, and then publish their best guess. As you can imagine, these estimates are woefully inaccurate.

Furthermore, even if a competitor offers their true conversion rate, you have to wonder if they calculated it properly in the first place. Do they make incorrect assumptions about what should or shouldn’t be included in their conversion rate? Would it be higher or lower if they used different criteria? Most importantly: Do they calculate their conversion rate the same way you calculate yours?

For instance, suppose Acme Soap (a fictional company) offers a special user account for wholesale partners to place wholesale orders directly through their ecommerce platform. These kinds of sales aren’t usually calculated with the conversion rate because those buyers aren’t the same as traditional shoppers. You might wonder how Acme Soap converts so high, when in truth, they’re just using bad math–including wholesale purchase with their direct-to-consumer ecommerce conversion rate.

This means that any conversion rate offered by another organization is, at best, inaccurate, and at worst, deliberately dishonest. Short of getting yourself hired by one of your competitors and making friends with whomever guards the marketing data, there’s no way to obtain a volume of reliable conversion rate numbers on similar organizations.

Beyond Comparisons: Focusing on Your Customers and Your Own Growth

As the owner or manager of an ecommerce store, we recommend looking beyond conversion rates, never comparing yours to your competitors’ data, and focusing on your own customers. Optimization isn’t football. You aren’t trying to win the game by scoring more points than your opponent. In fact, your opponents’ scores don’t matter at all.

Instead, we suggest thinking like a runner. Your goal is to beat the clock, build your own muscles and take every advantage available to beat your best time. When you manage to improve, simply set a new goal, and begin work anew. If you’re focusing on every opportunity to improve like an Olympic athlete would, someday when you are forced to look at competitors, they’ll be left in the dust!

What kinds of advantages and opportunities can you collect? Knowledge from your customers. Unlike studying your competitors, studying your customers is directly applicable. The better you can serve their needs and create better shopping experiences, the higher your conversion rate will climb.

To that end, there are some better questions you can ask that will give you a deeper understanding of your organization’s performance, help you learn more from your customers, and shed some light on what to do to move forward.

Does this mean all benchmarks are pointless?

Not all benchmarks are bad. Competitor and industry benchmarks are pointless for the reasons we explained above, but your own benchmarks are highly valuable. After all, you have to know where you’re starting in order to gauge the effectiveness of your optimization strategy.

Furthermore, drilling down two individual metrics is a better method of benchmarking then looking at your overall conversion rate. For instance, consider the conversion rate of your product details pages or the conversion rates of individual acquisition channels. Studying these metrics is far more actionable because you can quickly generate experiments to improve them.

Is competitive analysis useful at all?

Yes, absolutely. Understanding your competitor’s behavior is useful, but there are healthy and unhealthy ways of looking at your competition.

A healthy way of competitor analysis, for example, would be social listening, where you investigate comments made online about your competitors, and then use those sentiments and themes to inform your own campaigns and messaging. For instance, if your competitor’s customers complain about a common product defect, you might change your product listings, ads, and offers to emphasize how your products lack that defect.

In a case like this, you would be analyzing your competitors while still focused on yourself . You’re like Kobe Bryant, studying tapes of your basketball heroes, identifying what was effective or ineffective (based on traceable outcomes), and adapting their moves to the unique skills you have as a player.

Unhealthy competitor analysis involves blindly copying your competitor’s messaging, strategy, and tactics. In these cases, you aren’t learning or seeking to answer the “Why?” question. You’re just looking for a shortcut, hoping what works for them will also work for you.

Have we reached the limit of our DTC touchpoint?

The problem with identifying a ceiling is that it’s only a ceiling until you push it higher. Growth of a metric is always possible, but you have to consider the cost. Some optimizations offer diminishing returns. Others cost more than they’re worth.

Besides, customer learning never stops. Ever. It does not matter how clearly you grasp your customers’ wants, needs, desires, and problems. There is always something more to learn, which means there’s always a way to improve their experience.

How do we value success?

Putting a value on optimization efforts is actually simple. Will the revenue generated from the optimization program be greater than its cost? In this case, it’s important to think beyond singular sales. A generic conversion rate calculates the rate that visitors make a purchase, but there are other factors that paint a clearer picture of success, such as lifetime value, basket size, average revenue per user, etc.

What is our goal conversion rate?

Once you know your own conversion rate, and have vowed to ignore the metrics of your competitors or the industry, this is the most obvious concern. It’s a great question, too, because it leads you into actionable strategies that can actually push the needle.

Setting a top-level goal for your conversion rate is problematic because, like we said earlier, you’ll always want it to be higher. Instead, it’s better to set goals for individual experiments. These goals will depend on the nature of the experiment (some optimizations will move that needle more than others), your product, and your audience.

Goal-Setting, Experimentation, and Iterative Learning

Instead of using industry or competitor benchmarks, it’s smarter to focus on yourself. This lets you deal with one ecosystem where the variables are controlled, so you can make changes, measure the results, and then deduce reasonable answers to the question “Why?” Ultimately, this means that optimization is an entirely internal process.

First, it’s important to have clarity regarding your bigger business goals. This will help you design specific conversion rate goals that serve your broader purpose. For instance, an organization that’s trying to develop a broad network of retail partnerships may only be willing to Increase its conversion rate if it doesn’t cannibalize sales from other channels.

1. Goal-setting

Generally, we suggest focusing on two kinds of conversion rate goals: 1) Goals that help your visitors research your products or services and 2) Goals that help your visitors purchase those products from you. Everything else is secondary to the desires of the customer. This customer-centric view is key to the success of your organization.

In order to adopt a customer-centered approach, management will need to accept an iterative mindset that recognizes the value of testing and data-based decision making and you’ll likely need to employ the services of a digital experience optimization specialist.

Identify goals that elevate the quality of your customers’ research and buying activities. Listen (to their words and the data of their session) to what they want and give it to them. Do they search for a particular type of content? Perhaps the right content will help. Do customers drop out of your long checkout workflow? Perhaps streamlining it will keep them engaged.

2. Experimentation

Experimentation is one pillar of digital experience optimization. Many ecommerce store owners and managers dive into this part of the process by emulating what they see their competitors doing, without setting proper goals or even understanding the purpose behind a particular strategy or tactic.

Admittedly, experimentation is a tedious and laborious process without the help of a practiced optimization specialist, especially in the beginning. Changes are often small and seemingly short-sighted, but they can add up to big improvements over time.

3. Iterative learning

This is the part of the process that isn’t available when you simply duplicate the strategies and tactics of your competitors. It’s also arguably the most valuable piece of the process because it provides you with the information you need to set better goals and run better experiments in the future. In the same way that your investment account grows faster due to compound interest, learning also expands exponentially.

Imagine that you learn that some of your customers want a subscription version of one of your products. You experiment with a subscription and find it to be successful. Armed with this knowledge, you might explore subscription options of other products, play around with offering bulk sizes, or create a box-of-the-month offering. In cases like this, learning begets more experimentation, which begets more learning.

This is the genesis of the answer to the “Why?” question that we at The Good believe is so critical to the success of any optimization plan.

Getting Started

We recognize that our philosophy of benchmarking represents a shift in thinking. It’s tempting to use your competitors as tools to judge your own success or failure within your industry, but these comparisons are always inapplicable and inaccurate.

In order to achieve true success, it’s best to focus on your own conversion rate, set goals, design experiments to creep it upward, and – most importantly – collect valuable information (that only applies to your business and customer) that can help you keep pushing.

If all of this sounds too difficult to manage, you aren’t alone. Countless ecommerce professionals lack the time and experience to implement a truly effective optimization program. You’ll find it cost-effective to outsource this function to a team of specialists. Otherwise, you’ll be leaving money on the table.

The Good offers a custom-built Digital Experience Optimization Program that helps you identify why your website is not meeting your goals and how to improve.

Remember: Your organization is unique. Comparing yourself to your competitors by focusing on their benchmarks is an ineffective distraction. Your customers provide all of the information you need to grow your brand.

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Learn how to use the hidden psychological forces that shape online behavior to craft digital journeys that delight, engage, and convert.

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At The Good, we’re often amazed to discover product filters working against the business, not for it. The incredible part is that while fixing the problem takes focus and planning, it’s not all that difficult and can produce powerful results.

In fact, when smart filter design is in place, the user experience (UX) is pleasant and helpful. And if you carry more than a few items or product categories, filtered navigation is essential to helping your visitors narrow their product search.

In this article, we are going to explain the importance of using product filters, offer some filter design strategies, and show you how we helped one brand earn a 5.97% lift in conversions by optimizing their filters. If you’re an ecommerce manager or similar, this topic is essential reading.

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Why Use Product Filters? 

Product filters help visitors quickly sort through your product collection to zone in on products they need. Think of filters like tightly-focused, super-helpful search engines that guide visitors deeper into your product catalog. If a customer wants a red T-shirt, for instance, a proper filter would let them view a collection of products that meet the attributes of “T-shirt” and “red.”

But filters don’t just help visitors find products they already know they want. Filters are a key component of product discoverability, which is visitors’ ability to browse, research, and choose products in a seamless, friction-less manner. This makes them an integral to marketing as well as to sales.

Let’s check out the definition of findability vs discoverability from Nielsen Norman Group: 

“Findability: Users can easily find content or functionality that they assume is present in a website.

Discoverability: Users encounter new content or functionality that they were not aware of previously.”

So filters serve both of these key purposes. Users can both discover products they didn’t know they were interested in AND find what they are looking for depending on how they hope to use the site.

(The site search bar is another critical piece of product discoverability.)

What happens if your product filters are poorly optimized? Some visitors will fail to find products that meet their needs and leave your store. Ultimately, this will reduce your conversion rate and disrupt your bottom line. 

Sadly, most ecommerce sites fail to use product filters well. According to research by the Baymard Institute, only 16% of major ecommerce sites provide a good filtering experience. 42% of those sites don’t have category-specific filter types for their main product categories and 20% lack thematic filters (season, style, etc.) despite selling products with obvious thematic qualities. 

Look at Apple’s site, for instance. The homepage filtering at the bottom is rather plain and user-unfriendly. Would you say one of the world’s premier tech firms fails with filters?

Ecommerce Product Filter Types

How should you set up your product filters? It’s important to keep in mind that product filtering is contextual. The right combination of filters depends on your product catalog, visitor preferences, and other factors. Your combination of filters will be unique to your store. 

For instance, if you sell lawnmowers, it makes sense to offer a filter for “yard size.” But that filter wouldn’t be appropriate on an ecommerce site that only sells pool toys. So to a certain extent, you’ll need to decide which product filters are right for your store.

That said, there are some common product filters that are appropriate on most e-commerce sites. These are the best filters for most stores:

1. Brand (but not if everything you sell is from the same brand)
2. Price
3. User ratings
4. Color
5. Material
6. Size
7. Theme (e.g. season or occasion)
8. Popularity
9. Promotion (e.g. new, featured, or on sale)

Note: Those are just filters examples. You may not need them all. 

One quick side point: The terms “filter” and “facet” are often used interchangeably, but it’s worth understanding the difference. “Filter” means to exclude items that don’t meet a criteria. Technically, if you select the “gaming PC” filter, you’re filtering out everything except gaming PCs. 

“Facet” extends the idea of filters into something more complex that describes aspects of an object. Selecting several facets will return a list of results that meet all of those criteria. So if you select “gaming PC,” “1 TB storage,” and “Intel processor,” you’ll get a list of computers that have those three qualities. 

Epicurious.com uses faceted navigation to let visitors combine filters. This search will return recipes for healthy dinner salads. This type of filtering is common and provides the best user experience.

Learn more: See Filters vs. Facets: Definitions by the Nielsen Norman Group.

Product Filter Design Strategies (With 25 Filter Examples)

Whether prospects searching your ecommerce site know exactly what they’re looking for or need some guidance, attention to these strategies will help make sure their experience on your site is geared towards helping them buy. We’ll also provide UX filter examples to illustrate the points given.

1. Keep your product filters simple

This is the number one rule for product filter design. The easier they are to identify and operate, the better your visitors will like them. Use filters that are reasonable and intuitive. Don’t create extra filters just to have more. It’s fine if you only need three or four.

2. Think before you start

Ecommerce filter design work can get complicated in a hurry. Plan yours carefully before you begin. Time invested here can pay off big in the development phase.

For instance, Zalora knows that sunglass buyers care about shape more than any other attribute, so they provide a filter to sort by shape and make it prominent in the filter menu. 

3. Test as you develop 

A filtering system that makes sense to the design team may not play well in front of a live audience. Test early and test often. The sooner you catch problems, the easier they are to solve.

Learn more: Read our full guides on User Testing and A/B testing to learn how to measure the effects of your website and conversion rate changes. 

4. Consider your products from the viewpoint of your customers 

What information do your customers need in order to make a wise purchasing decision? What do your customers desire? Do they favor certain colors over others? Do you see seasonal jumps in certain product attributes?

Solicit help from your staff, specifically customer service representatives, and your audience to prepare an exhaustive list of product attributes. Leverage your data as much as possible to discover what your customers care about. 

5. Use the words your customers use to describe your products 

Avoid industry jargon and branding terms. Your ecommerce product filters should be absolutely practical and common sense. Don’t make customers struggle to find exactly what they’re looking for.

Behind The Click

Learn how to use the hidden psychological forces that shape online behavior to craft digital journeys that delight, engage, and convert.

GET YOUR COPY

Disney wants an age range filter for their massive collection of toys. They could list age groups (1-3, 4-6, etc.), but they know that assigning toys to rigid categories isn’t helpful and their customers tend to think in terms of “toddlers” and “kids.” So those are the words they use. 

6. Include product specification

If a detail is important enough to be mentioned in the product description, it could serve as a filter. Price, brand, RAM, and internal storage are all key pieces of information that are definitely mentioned in the product descriptions of these phones, so they make perfect filters. 

7. Look for higher-level groups of attributes for busy categories

Items might be grouped around themes or use cases. These are called thematic filters and they help visitors quickly hone in on the desired product, especially when they’re in the early stages of their buying journey and don’t know exactly what they need. Macy’s does this well by letting you filter dresses by occasion. 

8. Make filters stand out from the rest of the page

Visitors may not wish to use the filter immediately, but the user experience is enhanced just by making the option available. This can be achieved by placing your menu of products filters at an even level with other objects on your category pages.

9. Different products require different filter configurations

Your product filters should be different depending on the items they’re filtering. For instance, you wouldn’t need a filter for “screen size” on a category page of skateboards. The best filters are designed in groups around product categories so only appropriate filters are displayed. 

10. Give visual confirmation of active product filters

Make sure the visitor receives visual confirmation that your ecommerce filter navigation is active. For optimum user experience, the current filter state (waiting for input, working, and output delivered) should be readily apparent. 

Zappos distinguishes their active filters from their inactive filters with color. The “X” to cancel the filter is another indicator.

11. Test filter placement with your audience

Many companies find the left side of the page best for ecommerce product filters. Others get better results on the right. You won’t know for sure until you test placement on your own ecommerce site. Never stop testing.

In this product filters example, note how Mastercraft has studied their information hierarchy from a UX perspective. Visitors can begin with a search, or they can choose from a top-level category that then drops down and opens up to further selections to get where they want to go quickly.

12. Don’t overwhelm the visitor

Don’t list all available filters if the options will overwhelm the visitor. Instead, use grouping in the displayed filter list to help shoppers keep moving along the sales path. Macy’s does it well again here. The filter groups (size, fabric, and color) are collapsible. The visitor only interacts with the groups that matter to them.

13. Consider using different filters for mobile and desktop

In some cases, it makes sense to offer different filters on mobile and desktop devices. For instance, you may want a stripped-down version for your mobile site that doesn’t include rarely-used options. Here again, testing will tell you when you are on target.

Learn more: Follow these 15 tactics to optimize your mobile experience and increase sales.

14. Optimize for filter speed as well as for practicality

Page speed is always a critical factor. You lose 1% in online revenue for every millisecond your site delays in loading. Your product filters should sort and display the results quickly. 

Learn more: Read our guide on page speed optimization to learn why speed matters and how to boost yours. 

Leverage data from filters to help you better understand the desires of your customers.

15. Use promoted filters to help users quickly navigate to popular sub-categories

High-traffic filters may serve visitors better by being moved up to a higher level in the scheme. This helps the visitor quickly focus on what they need. In this product filters example, ScotteVest opts for image-based filtering on the homepage. 

Apple also does this well. Their top-level navigation helps the visitor get quickly to the category of choice. Navigation is often the first type of filtering.

16. Use filters to beat your competition

Jump ahead of the competition by providing exceptional filtering as a user experience (UX) feature. Most ecommerce websites get a failing grade when it comes to the filtering experience.

First, audit your competition carefully. How do they use product filters? Do they make any critical mistakes? Do they filter products in a way you never considered before? Then implement the filters that make the most sense for your brand. 

17. Use product filters on sites of all sizes

Always use filters on ecommerce sites with large product catalogs, but consider a filter even for stores without extensive product offerings. Anything you do to improve UX is good for your business.

For example, makeup brands like Epionce often have a limited selection of products, but they still have some categories for by concern like “dryness” and “anti-aging.”

18. Limit over-filtering by indicating product quantity on the filter

Displaying the number of products in a filter helps the customer understand the size of that category and whether they should apply additional filters to make their search easier. 

Home Depot includes quantities on each of its filters. When you select a filter, the new page contains updated quantities based on your current filters. 

19. Allow filtering by product reviews

People really care about product reviews. This is a form of social proof and can draw purchases based on the feedback of others alone. So it deserves its own filter.

Home Depot does a great job here, as well. Their review filter lets you choose your bottom number. The results display everything above that threshold. 

20. Make it as easy for searchers to remove filters as it is to add them

If a customer isn’t happy with the results of their filter combination, they may want to remove some filters to “open up” the sort. Give them a simple way to remove individual product filters. 

In this product filters example, notice how House of Fraser turns each filter into a button that can be toggled off by clicking the “X.”

21. Hide filter options that will return zero results

You definitely don’t want visitors to arrive on empty pages. If a filter won’t produce any results, it shouldn’t be an option. This means your product filters plugin, tool, or add-on should Work alongside your inventory management system. If a product’s inventory is zero, the associated filter should be hidden.

22. Allow visitors to apply multiple filter values of the same type

Just because a visitor applies a filter doesn’t mean they know exactly what they want. If they want to look at green and blue jackets, let them. Don’t force them to select one or the other. Notice how Zappos lets you filter by multiple shoe sizes. 

23. Show applied filters in the original location and in an overview

Make it easy for the user to find all the current ecommerce product filters by listing them as an overview and in the filters menu. This gives them complete control over their experience. 

24. Don’t allow scrolling in product filters

Including a huge list makes for poor usability. Many visitors will dismiss it and move on to a site with less overwhelming navigation. Truncate your product filters and provide an expansion option. If a user wants to see the complete list, let them expand it with a selector.

25. Order filters by importance, not alphabetically

Here again, choose your filtering plan according to the setup that will be most convenient for your customers. In this product filters example, Amazon offers filters that are relevant to that specific search query. If a customer searches for something, you can safely assume it’s important. (Also note the “See All 16 Departments” arrow to limit excessive options and cut down on confusion.)

Increase ROI with Product Filters like Fully

We’ve given you a big list of actionable strategies to make your product filters more effective, but what does this look like in a practical sense? To help you understand, we’d like to walk you through a case study of how we helped one brand improve their conversion rate with smart product filters. 

Fully is a direct-to-consumer brand that makes and sells office furniture They are known for their highly customizable products, such as the Jarvis standing desk. 

The work-from-home boom of 2020 put Fully in a unique position. Demand for their products was high. The lead time on their popular standing desk was longer than usual, but the Fully team didn’t want to miss out on sales. They needed a way to display their in-stock products so as to encourage customers to buy something if they weren’t willing to wait for the desk. 

All-in all, our job was to improve the browsing experience on Fully’s site to make other product categories more visible, thereby increasing the conversion rate and average order value. 

We audited Fully’s analytics to identify conversion barriers, drop-off points in the customer journey, and where customers were coming from. We learned that there was room to improve exit rates from category pages and the add-to-cart rate on product pages. 

Using heatmaps, we learned that customers like to engage with the filters located on category pages, particularly in regards to the different types of desks. This told us that customers who were unfamiliar with the brand didn’t understand the differences between the categories. 

In order to improve Fully’s browsing experience on product category pages, we redesigned the product filtering system. We simplified the categories to help users navigate to specific types of desks. We also added functionality to filter by product materials and parts. Here’s the before and after.

This approach increased visibility for lesser-known products and gave users a focused way to navigate the site. The result was a 5.97% boost to the conversion rate on both desktop and mobile sites. The change produced a 75:1 return on investment for the client. 

We Can Help with the Best UX Practices for Filtering

How did you do? Are you currently using many (or any) of the strategies in our list?

If you have a ways to go, don’t worry, you’re in good company. Like we said, only 16% of brands are providing a strong product filtering experience. And even if you already offer good filters, there’s always room for improvement. 

But remember, you’re not improving these filters for the filters sake. Every one of these improvements means that you’re eliminating friction and making it a little easier for your consumers to purchase from you. 

In short, the more you work to include these strategies, you’ll not only work your way into that 16% but you’ll also provide a killer user experience for your visitors and most importantly, you’ll drive even more conversions.

Not sure where to start? We know it’s frustrating to spend your money on traffic, but your revenue doesn’t change. At The Good, we help online businesses like yours remove all the barriers to conversion. Get in touch.

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