Success Story

Thomas Pink Used VWO-Enabled A/B Tests To Record a Revenue Increase

14.2% Revenue

About Thomas Pink

Thomas Pink is a London-based clothes retailer that specialises in shirts. Their shirt-making is inspired by Jermyn Street, home of traditional British shirt-making craft. Over time, the company expanded its range to include clothing for men and women. In addition to their brick-and-mortar stores, the company sells and ships products worldwide through its website thomaspink.com.

Goals

Thomas Pink wanted to optimize their home page to boost online sales from the website. For this, the company hired Practicology, an independent eCommerce consultancy, who used VWO tools for the optimization process.

Tests run

Based on consumer surveys and insights from their brick-and-mortar stores, Thomas Pink’s marketing experts concluded that visitors who engaged with the fitting room were more likely to turn into customers. Also, asking salesmen for shirts in particular styles and colors was an indication of the prospect’s intent to buy.

Another insight was that a large proportion of customers were repeat buyers. As Lee Howard from Practicology said, “Anything to aid them find a product quicker should help.”

This is what the home page originally looked like:

The team decided to make it easier for users to find what they were looking for (size, color, style, and others) by adding a “shirt finder” tool. This, it was felt, would help push more visitors into the sales funnel by replicating the salesmen and fitting room experiences online.

To simplify the look and feel of the home page and thus reduce distraction, the team also decided to remove the content-heavy middle section. This, in effect, would push up the product images and links.

A new new version of the home page was developed. This is what the variation looked like:

Using VWO tools, an A/B test was run for 30 days, covering a total of 136,000 visitors to the website. The test tracked three goals: number of order confirmations (the primary goal), revenue (and revenue/visitor), and engagement.

Conclusion

The result confirmed their hypothesis about the value of the shirt finder. Visitors did find the shirt finder tool useful and going by the results, it clearly made the purchase process easier. The variation recorded 12.18% increase in purchases.

The absolute revenue for the new version also increased by 11.6%. The growth in revenue/conversion was 14.2%.

The test results also proved that customers of Thomas Pink did in fact care about ease of purchase. Introducing the shirt finder tool right on the home page made it easy for users to quickly get to their favorites so more people bought more shirts.

This particular test made 2 changes in the variation, so it was not possible to segregate the impact of each change.

To determine the exact contribution in the uplift of all the goals, a multivariate test—with total 3 variations and 1 control—would have been useful. This could make for a good set of next tests and also help build a strong experimentation knowledge repository.