Digital UX design agency Turum-burum increased shoe retailer Intertop’s store conversion rate by 55%. Here’s how they experimented their way to success with the help of Hotjar.

Truly a household name in Ukraine, Intertop’s 25 years on the market as a shoe retailer has seen them open 114 stores in 25 cities, and run an online operation through their brand site which gets 3.5 million monthly visits. In 2017, Intertop built out an omnichannel ecommerce model, meaning fully-integrated shopping experiences, uniting user experiences from brick-and-mortar to mobile-browsing and everything in between.

With high growth and rapidly increasing traffic to their site, Intertop engaged CRO and UX agency Turum-burum with these objectives:

• Simplify the customer journey on the Intertop website
• Increase conversion rates
• Speed up the introduction of user experience changes
• Mitigate risks of damaging the Intertop site experience

How Turum-burum strategized improving Intertop’s conversion rates

Turum-burum initiated their Conversion Rate Optimization program based on step-by-step interface enhancements. They call their model ESR: Evolutionary Site Redesign. In practical terms, all Turum-burum’s proposed website changes for Intertop were going to be anchored on analytical proof, and confirmed through A/B testing—a proven way of minimizing risk of rolling out changes that impact the shopping experience, and ultimately boosting conversion rates and revenue through:

• Quick implementation of changes on the website
• Continuous development of new tests
• Focus on measurable results
• Risk minimization

Where Hotjar data figured into Turum-burum’s work for Intertop

Take a look at Turum-Burum’s model for how they conduct Evolutionary Site Redesign. It’s clear that careful analysis and experimentation form the crux of their client work.

Like many successful Conversion Rate Optimization programs, Turum-Burum’s approach of blending Hotjar’s user experience data into a recipe of solid user research and analysis of Google Analytics data is designed to form experiment hypotheses backed by analytics and UX data. With this kind of approach, there’s no need to operate on guesswork when making changes on a website of any size.

In this case study we’re going to take a deep dive into the two aspects of Turum-burum’s ESR program where Hotjar provided them with high-value UX analysis:

1. Getting user feedback with Hotjar Surveys, and using the data to prioritize UX design improvements.
2. Using Hotjar Heatmaps and Recordings to understand painpoints in the user journey.

In their UX analysis phase, Turum-burum collected Intertop customer feedback with the help of Hotjar exit-intent pop-up, which, as the user was closing the tab of the browser, displayed the question: “Why would you like to stop placing the order?”

They found that 48.6% of 444 respondents noted that they were leaving the page as they were unable to place their order.

Learning from customer feedback: minimizing steps in the checkout funnel led to increased orders

Actually being unable to place the order stood out as a dominant reason for customers abandoning their order at checkout. With this confirmed, Turum-burum focused on reducing bottlenecks in the conversion funnel from ‘checkout’ to ‘order placed’.

Denis Studdenikov is Turum-burum’s Head of UX/UI. Remarking on the priorities at this stage of working on Intertop’s ordering experience, Denis told us, “We learned that the greatest outflow of users during the order process was happening at the registration/authorization stage. The registration form was cumbersome and contained too many fields. Users were leaving throughout this process, abandoning their purchase.”

Here’s a quick overview of the changes Turum-burum tested out on the checkout experience:

• The number of checkout fields was reduced to 3: a faster process for Intertop customers.
• The “Place Order” page was split into semantic blocks, and a separate field was shown with the products and cost breakdowns.
• Autofill functions were added for authorized users to reduce friction when placing an order.

A/B testing these changes, the findings were that the conversion rate on the Intertop checkout increased by 54.68% in the variant. Rolling out these iterations, a performance KPI evaluation concluded that Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) grew by 11.46% and checkout bounce rate decreased by 13.35%.

This kind of result deserves a round of applause. 👏 The reason why we at Hotjar love this is its simplicity:

• Identify a conversion bottleneck in high-level analytics ✅
• Ask users what’s going wrong with a simple Hotjar survey ✅
• Design smart experiments driven by user feedback ✅
• Roll out successful variants that lead to ARPU growth and checkout bounce rate decrease ✅

Based on Turum-burum’s website analysis, and based on trends found through Hotjar user surveys, another weak point was found on Intertop’s site experience –– filters.

There were usability issues with these filters, as well as technical bugs. The hypothesis was confirmed by a surge of comments from users.

To give an example, when searching for a snazzy new pair of shoes, a user picking size 42 would also be shown shoe models only available in sizes 43 and 44. Not a great experience, adding needless friction.

With the help of Hotjar Recordings, Turum-burum got an understanding of where Intertop customers were struggling at this stage of the buyer journey. They saw how customers were needing to browse through a huge number of pages looking for their shoe size, since they couldn’t sort products as they’d originally intended.

“In the new design, we identified and prioritized clear product categories, which are essential navigation elements in fashion shopping experience,” Denis from Turum-burum told us. “Active filtering is a user behavior standard with online stores like Intertop, so it was important to provide the customers with such an opportunity on the first screen.”

Here are the product filtering improvements Turum-burum tested:

• place all product filters in the upper panel so that the user could understand the opportunities of sorting and filtration right from the first screen.
• for filters with a large number of parameters, added search and scroll, so that the necessary brand, size, or another parameter could be easily found

Heatmapping product pages: discovering opportunities to drive conversions

Hotjar’s Heatmaps showed the Turum-burum team that for users on devices with standard resolution, the main Call-To-Action (CTA) on product pages (‘Buy Now’) was often being missed. It was located below the average fold, so chances were high that a user wouldn’t scroll far enough to see it. Heatmaps were also showing that concentrations of users’ clicks fell around product images to see more details: functionality that did not exist.

Another insight gained from website analysis through GA, and verified through user recordings, was that brand search was one of the most popular routes through Intertop’s website. Brand details on product pages were not clickable - an experience gap for users.

Taking onboard the learnings about how Intertop customers engaged with product pages, Turum-burum created a new product page design. It’s more minimalist, and is aimed at helping the user carefully select their product and add it to their cart.

The tests run on Intertop’s product filtering and product pages were heavily influenced by the experience data provided by Hotjar’s Recordings and Heatmaps, with the focus on what users really want and care about in their online shopping experience.

After rolling out the new product list and product page, Turum-burum were able to report back to Intertop on these excellent results:

• Conversion rate from product page to cart: increased by 31%,
• Conversion rate from cart to checkout page: increased by 36.6%,
• Average Revenue Per User: increased by 13.3%.

These great business outcomes are the ‘proof in the pudding’ that ultimately, what’s best for users is best for business. Turum-burum optimized Intertop’s site experience across a diverse portfolio of experiments, all driven by a focus on helping users reach their objective, and reducing as much friction as possible on the way.

Editor’s note: a big thank-you to the team at Turum-burum for working with us on this case study. To learn more about how Turum-burum helps ecommerce businesses grow their revenue through User Experience Design, head over to their site.