Tradesy Home Feed
Project Overview
Problem statement: How do we increase the our buyer conversion when starting from the home page/feed?
Tradesy was planning a large marketing campaign. Our goal was to see if an improvement to the top of funnel experience could increase the number of people who started a checkout and completed a purchase.
We had discovered that people who started their user journey from the homepage had a dramatically lower chance of continuing to explore what Tradesy has to offer and ultimately completing a purchase.
Our goal was to explore how a new home page/feed experience might increase the number of people who ultimately completed a purchase. If we could increase this metric, the business could confidently spend to increase traffic to the top of our sales funnel.
Problem Areas
Lack of products surfaced for first time visitors
When a user lands on Tradesy’s homepage and starts scrolling, they do not see any products until they have scrolled two thirds of the way down the page.
No personalization
Too many value props without showcasing relevant content. When users would visit Tradesy, the only time the home page would change was after someone had browsed around the site and interacted with individual products. This would generate a “Recently Viewed” product rack and a “More from [Brand]” rack. These were a start, but did not surface a diverse collection of products for users to discover.
Outdated image layouts for collection cards
Tradesy has “Collections.” These are an edited group of items that the marketing team pull together to help users find high quality items quickly. To display our collections, we have several marketing images on the home page. These images were locked in a landscape layout. This created production problems for the marketing team.
Not optimized for mobile web use
All of the problems compounded when viewing the homepage on a mobile device. It would take more than three swipes to reach the first product.
Key issue with iOS
It also lacked personalized dynamic content. Therefore, the home feed experience was fairly static.
Design Process
Failed Fast
Our initial hypothesis for improving Tradesy’s buyer conversion rate was to create an onboarding experience where people would select their sizes and style preferences. This would enable Tradesy to deliver hyper relevant content. After the initial design cycle we realize the scope of creating a new onboarding experience would also require an overhaul our home page/feed to support the personalized content. This scope would have been too large to execute in our timeframe. So we scaled back to a singular focus of revamping the home page/feed experience to be more dynamic and include more products.
Wireframes for home feed modules
To start the redesign of our home feed, we first focused on our native iOS app. We explored a variety of new modules. The aim was to generate multiple ways of delivering products to users. With some concepts focusing on creating paths for users to provide product suggestion feedback via surveys or approve or reject. To others that would infuse variation and rhythm into the interface. Achieving the dynamic feeling that was missing from our original version.
New and refreshed modules
We resolved to have a home feed composed of various modules that we were eager to test out and move around as needed. Some exciting outcomes of this redesign
- Improved code base: This meant that we could easily modify modules or move them around in the future to improve the page performance.
- Streamlined internal operations: With the redesign we improved our internal operations in multiple departments. The
Implementation & Results
We saw a remarkably positive result from the implementation of our web updates. This likely is the case because the web experience also saw the most dramatic updates, from new branding to the first time we were able to show multiple dynamic racks of relevant products on the home page.
The iOS experience however saw a more neutral lift. Our plan was to continue refining module placement and test new module designs to see if we could improve this. However, shortly after the initial A/B test of this design we were officially acquired by the company Vestiaire Collective and we began to sunset the Tradesy brand.
Web - Very Positive
New home feed personalized vs. control:
Checkout started rate +70.22% lift
Buyer Conversion +68.51% lift
New home feed default vs. control:
Checkout started rate +58.35% lift
Buyer Conversion +46.46% lift
iOS - Neutral
New home feed personalized vs. control:
Buyer Conversion -1.76% lift
New home feed default vs. control:
Buyer Conversion +2.87% lift
Final Design iOS
Responsive Web - Final Design
