Customer Case: Atea & Nelly
The quick-shop button… Also known as instant shop, express buy, quick view, direct add, shop now, quick add to cart, quick cart amongst other things. There are many different ways you can refer to it and also with that many different ways you can show it on your site.
Just so that we are all aligned before we dig into this blog post, our definition is the button you can press (usually on the product listing page) to add a product to your cart without having to visit the actual product page – time saving!
Story of the quick-shop button
It’s unclear what the origin of the quick-shop button is and who did it first. Even Chat-GPT couldn’t pinpoint this for me, but most likely it came as a solution to increase the user experience (or to increase impulse purchases) by letting the users add a product to their cart directly from the product listing page instead of being forced to visit the product detail page. Today you can see them on various sites in different industries from pharmaceuticals and grocery stores to fashion retailers and electronics. So with all these stores using quick-shop buttons, should you use it?
To Quick-shop or not to quick-shop?
Like the header image says, there is no quick answer and no “one-size fits all” scenario. You’ll need to look at your individual business to see if you should incorporate or not. A key question to ask yourself is what type of product are we selling? Is it more complex and requires the user to read more about it? For example you most likely wouldn’t purchase a car without doing some investigation first, while buying the same painkillers you’ve bought the last couple of years doesn’t require much thought.
Remember that when you add something to your site, that is one more thing that you always have to think about. Ideally you’d want to verify the inclusion of a quick-shop button through an A/B test which brings us to what you’ve been waiting for. Our cases!
Laying the foundation
To lay the foundation let us start by presenting the two companies we have for our case today.
Nelly
A B2B founded in Sweden 2004, Nelly is a leading online player for young adults interested in fashion and beauty. With an impressive journey, the company has gone from being an internet startup to one of the most well-known and loved e-commerce platforms in fashion in the Nordics.
Atea
A B2B founded in Norway 1968 under the name Merkantildata, Atea is the leading supplier of IT infrastructure in the Nordic and Baltic regions. With over 8,000 employees located in 88 cities, in seven European countries — Atea has a powerful local presence across all of the markets they serve.
As you can see we have two big players from two different industries for our case today.
What did we do, why did we do it and what was the goal?
Starting with Nelly, what we did was to completely remove the quick-shop button. Why you might ask? We observed that users didn’t interact with it so much and that it might be an unnecessary feature on the site.
The space could be used for something else in the future or it could just be one thing less to think about. Naturally for this test our goal was to see that we did not affect the user experience in a negative way i.e less add to carts, begin checkout and order.
For Atea, we did the opposite of Nelly and added a copy to the quick-shop button to better signify for the user what the button does. We had observed that it might be unclear for the user what the quick-shop button actually was and again that users didn’t interact with it so much. So the goal here was to get users to click more on that beautiful green button.
The test setup
Now that we know what the goal of the tests was and the execution, let’s just quickly go through some details before going to the results.
Starting with Nelly, we ran the test everywhere a product card is present on mobile since that’s the device a strong majority of the users uses. Desktop also has a quick-shop function but it does not function in the same way as on mobile. For our KPIs we looked at clicks into the product detail page, add to carts, go to checkout, order, revenue and lastly we also measured interactions with the quick-shop button in the original version.
For Atea, we also ran the test everywhere a product card is present, but this time only on desktop. As mentioned before Atea is a B2B, so naturally you’ll find a majority of your users on desktop. For our KPIs we had similar goals as for Nelly. We looked at add to carts on both the quick-shop button and the one you can find on the product detail page, order and revenue.
Now that we know how the test was setup, let’s dive into the last segment of this post.
The results!
So how did it go with our tests? Did we achieve what we aimed for?
Nelly
Starting with Nelly, again we could see that during the test period, 2% of the users interacted with the quick-shop button in the original version. We don’t have anything directly to compare to since we removed the quick-shop button in the variant, but when we looked at clicks into the product detail page we could see that both the original and variant had a conversion rate of 81%, meaning that we could not see a difference there.
For add to cart (from product detail page) we could again not see any difference between the original and variant with both having a conversion rate of 14% and for go to checkout and order we also saw no difference. So far so good, but to be sure that we weren’t hurting the average order quantity or average order value we also took a look at the revenue part. To our satisfaction we saw no difference between the original and the variant.
The take-away from this test was that even though we saw a 2% conversion rate for the quick -shop button, we could not see that it correlated with more orders or higher average order quantity/value. We also had a good sample size, so we could feel safe proceeding to remove it. Less to think about for Nelly!
Atea
For Atea, where we took an opposite approach to Nelly, we saw some really interesting really interesting results. We could in the original see that less than 1% of the users interacted with the quick-shop button BUT in the variant however where we added the copy to the button we saw an increase of 652%(!), statistically significant. Obviously results like that raises a warning flag, so we did necessary controls to see if we had a bug in the test, but after doing extensive checks we could not find anything and could take the result for what it was. To be noted though, normally when you compare against a really low conversion rate, the effect will also be more dramatic like in this case.
When we looked at the add to cart rate on the product detail page we saw a slight decrease for the variation. However the result was not statistically significant, so we would have needed more data there or a larger difference to confirm it. When we looked at orders we could just like with Nelly see no difference, but when we looked at the revenue we could for Atea see an increase for the variant in both average quantity and average order value – Eureka!
The take-away for this test was that we could by signifying the quick-shop button increase the likelihood of the users adding a product to their cart which didn’t lead to more orders, but more money into the business. This test confirmed what has been known for a long time – If you want your users to interact with something – make it clear what it is!
To summarise
What we did in these two cases was to test the “same” thing but with two different approaches. For Nelly we wanted to see if we could safely remove the quick-shop button, while for Atea we wanted to see if we could increase interactions with it by signifying what it was. In these cases we could verify our hypothesis and we safely proceed to implement the changes.
You might ask why we didn’t take the approach we did with Atea for Nelly as well. The answer is quite simple. Nelly is primarily a mobile site, meaning that if we added a copy to the quick-shop button it would cover most of the product image and also conflict with other badges that were already in use (for e.g. the outlet one on the variant). Atea on the other hand is primarily a desktop site, meaning that we can use that extra space to our advantage.
And as a last thing before we wrap up this post… These results we achieved in our tests is not a confirmation that you’ll see the same results if you were to implement these changes. That’s why you should always test before doing changes to confirm that you don’t hurt the user experience.
