Clarify the product:

1. What all components does the product description entail?
2. What is the call to action on a product description page? – Is to to add to cart, buy directly, check zip code and add to cart or save for later?
3. What sort of products do we sell? apparels, accessories, low price, high price, fast fashion etc?

Clarify the scope and definition:

What does conversion over here mean? Is it products added to cart or products purchased?

Goal:

As this feature is part of a larger user shopping journey with not much control over top of the funnel for this page but with control over bottom of the funnel for this page.

The key metric I believe that would be helpful would be %of products added to cart.

Reasoning: As we are looking to improve conversions which here mean add to cart. %Products added to cart is a useful metric to depict the health of the funnel for the page.

Before going into depth about users, changes and builds, I would like to investigate if something has has gone wrong on our end.

Internal Factors:

1. I would like to investigate if this has been historically low for us or is it a recent trend or just seasonal.
2. Did we make any UI changes that are making it more difficult for customers to add products to cart
3. Is there any bug which is preventing customers to add products to cart?
4. Did we push some new feature or fix that broke the functionality?
5. Is the reporting tool working right? – Are we calculating it correctly, maybe the products are expensive and the customer comes back again at a later date and then adds it to the cart after pondering over it.
6. Investigate recent product ratings? have they gone down recently that might deter people from moving forward?
7. #number of images viewed per product visited
8. Any bad PR about the products?
9. Are our marketing channels especially re-targeting concentrating as much as they were on this segment of customers.
10. Is the drop across the board or for any particular group, new/retained or from a particular region or product category.
11. Is there any issues with shipping, are we sharing the same TAT as we did before and are we honoring it?
    1. Are sizes indicated correctly? In clothes, sizes can be tricky as the same labelled size might be actually different for different regions.

External Factors:

1. Does the current time precede a holiday season or any occasion that might push people to postpone purchases?
2. What is the macro economic condition of the country?
3. Is there a competitor that is offering a better deal to customers primarily interms of price but can also be in terms of better product description pages or any other new functionality, due to which customers are inclined to go through a purchase on that platform.

I would conduct user research, both qualitative and quantitative to zero in on the root cause and implement appropriate changes.

In case the conversion has been historically the same and we are looking at increasing the conversion. I would like to concentrate on medium intent customers who browse multiple websites and then decide to purchase. This can be because of, shipping cost and date, product description, rating, images etc.

1. Add images with different size models wearing the same dress.
2. Add videos of models wearing the dress.
3. Add a recommendation section which will include similar products based on style and price so that the customer can continue their shopping journey and add another product if not this.
4. An augmented reality feature where a person can upload their image and try out clothes in a virtual change room or sorts.
5. Optimize existing images – A/B test images for products and place the best performing image in front. The same can be done with reviews as well.
6. A/B test the product description format, language and tone and implement the best performing.

There are many factors that can influence this loss. I’ll address these in the following paragraphs as this case can go beyond ‘the product’ as a website.

1. Brand/Marketing  – especially if we’re talking fashion e-commerce. A strong brand is essentially what wins the sales.
2. Pictures – are the photos of the product appealing enough?  Are they interpreting product properly? Are you showcasing the product from different angles/in detail? When it comes to fashion, the goal is to showcase the product in the context so you can imagine yourself wearing/using it. Well put together (aspirational) photos win. Test it out. Maybe you can utilize blogger to freshen things up.
3. Funnel – Is your funnel optimized correctly? Where all those churned people came from? Were they really looking for the product or just landed accidentally? I’d investigate and look for the patterns.
4. Hacks – here are few ideas to try:

a) product copy – A/B test different (compelling) product copy

b) incentive – adding a banner with discount code

c) adding a banner with a number on how many people bought this product/are looking at the product right now (inspired by the Booking website )

d) adding complementary products on the page can increase browsing time and eventually sales

**If you have a substantial number of visitors (ca 100-200k/month) it might be worth to investigate and try out marketing experience tools. These enable you to optimize the web experience/marketing activities based on your visitor’s behavior. On scale.

These are the things I’ll look into, identify what’s happening and prioritize based on insights. Happy to dig deeper if you happen to have further questions!

1)    Is there any fix that went into the production that broke the functionality related to product description page that has caused the drop in the conversion rate.

2)    Is this a sudden drop or the gradual drop. If this is a sudden drop then it could be tied to issue#1

3)    Is this drop because of the seasonality issue. Like the same drop happened last year also or the same drop is happening year of year so it could be tagged to the seasonality.

4)    Analyze the type of customers who are getting dropped. The drop could be on the existing customers (which is drastic as they were loyal to your product but not using your product anymore), or the new customers are not getting acquired at the same rate as previously. The customers who are still buying from the platform try to understand from them what job they are trying to get done by buying. Deep analysis on these three types of customers will help to understand the drop rate is in which customer segment.

5)    Understanding the marketing and advertisements campaign which were running. Was there any discount or promotions running in the previous months which increased the sale but now that promotion doesn’t exist anymore so there is decrease in the sale. The sales could have returned back to normal but since we see a huge dip from previous month to this month because of no promotion we might assume that there is decrease in conversion rate.

6)    Is there any war like situation going on in the country or there is a recession because of which people are losing their jobs? If any of such economic crisis are there people will not prefer to buy.

7)    Analysis of the competitors. Understanding the market, if there is any new ecommerce platform that is launched or there is a new feature launched by the competitors because of which customers are getting directed to them and not buying products from our platform. Understanding the competitive landscape by logging to their websites, spending time on their websites and figuring out the prices at which they are offering the products.

8)    Understanding the regions, is this drop happening in any specific geography or is it across the world.

Based on the analysis for each of the points mentioned above, I would conduct both qualitative and quantitative surveys to understand why customers are not buying the products. Qualitative survey will help me to understand the “what type of customers are getting dropped and why customers are getting dropped” and quantitative survey will help me to understand “how many” customers are getting dropped.

I will conduct the usability testing and understand the ease of use of the product. May be customers do not find this product feasible to use, the process is too complicated to add the product in the cart, the billing process is too lengthy, customers are finding it hard to search for the product because of the UI not so user friendly. Usability testing will help me to understand these problems.

I will also conduct A/B test where few sets of customers will be directed to some changes which I will be doing in the e-commerce platform. The changes could be related to the layout or the way you search a product. By analyzing the traffic which is going to changed version of product vs the original product will help to deep diver into identifying the problems. I can conduct different kinds of A/B test.