Case Study: Timeless Wrought Iron
Website Conversion Rate Increases 138%
Timeless Wrought Iron is a niche ecommerce website selling wrought iron furniture and accessories. Frustrated with the lack of customization available on their current platform, usability issues that couldn’t be resolved, and an inability to obtain analytics data from the shopping cart, Ryan Hansen, the CEO of Timeless Wrought Iron decided to redesign the website and move it a Volusion platform.
The Problem: The Redesigned Website Underperforms the Old Website
In late April 2010, the redesign was ready and he switched over to the new system. Unfortunately, the move to Volusion was unexpectedly turbulent. There were some issues with the cart and there were some search engine ranking problems. Traffic and sales both seemed to drop off the edge of the earth. “Whenever you change platforms and change the look and feel of your website, there is a loss of momentum. I expected it, I just did not expect it to be as bad as it was, “said Ryan.
Ryan did a lot of scrambling, and by early autumn, the traffic had started to come back, but sales were still an issue. The conversion rate dropped to 0.18%. “I’d expected a little drop in the conversion rate, but not this much. I’d done redesigns before and I thought sales would rebound in a month or two (with our typical buying cycle), but this time it was really different.”
The Solution: A Continuous Improvement Conversion Optimization Program
Ryan had worked with Diamond Website Conversion on his old website, so in June 2010 he contacted us again to help him improve his conversion rate on the new one. “We were getting visitors again but no one was buying. It really kind of boggled my mind because the website itself was much easier to navigate, it was easier to use and it performed much faster. It cost us money to get the visitors there, but if no one buys, it’s useless traffic. I’d rather have 100 people come to the website and 10 of them buy than pay for 1000 people to come to the website and have only 10 of them buy. That’s when I knew we needed to fix our conversion.”
We worked with Ryan from June to September, making recommendations for changes and testing, helping him with design issues, working on copywriting issues. We systematically worked through the home page, category pages, product detail pages and the shopping cart. We put users on his website to learn where visitors got stuck and we tested designs and copy to see which converted better.
The Result: A 138% Conversion Rate Increase
In May of 2010, the conversion rate for Timeless Wrought Iron was 0.18%; by October of 2010, his conversion rate was up to 0.43% an increase of 138%.
“It’s almost like you provided a small education for me in conversion optimization. You helped me target the problems that visitors were having, and taught me to look at things from multiple angles. As a result I have been continually making improvements with that education alone which has resulted in a continual increase of our conversion rate, currently at 0.62%”
