Improving Conversion with Compare Products

Problem

engagement opportunities are limited for customers throughout the existing experience

Strategy

revisit the content, interactions, and value of this experience to add additional ways for customers to engage, improving conversion

Timeline

8 weeks to design handoff
June to August 2024

Team

myself and Karlie (manager)
Jeff (product), Trang (engineering),
design and engineering partners

Results

75+ basis point
increase in conversion

Discover

Context

The existing compare products experience was little more than a gateway to the standalone compare products page (far right). After taking an additional click, the user would enter an extensive, long list of all product specs and user-generated without the ability to filter.

The lack of any engaging elements within the compare products experience (aside from ones that would take the user off the page) was considered a missed opportunity to explore.

The content on the compare products page was valuable, but very difficult to navigate with the lack of any filtering options.

Product Detail Page & Standalone Page

Research: Best Buy

A research review of existing studies Best Buy had conducted on this topic revealed a few key takeaways.

  • Participants found it difficult to scan long-form content and could scan and sort through specs that were organized in tables much easier.

  • When comparing products, users focused on specific information that they expect to find on product detail pages: price/cost, product features, customer reviews/images.

  • User-generated content like reviews and images submitted by customers is typically viewed as more trustworthy and the presence of it can improve the perception of the retailer.

Research: Baymard Institute

Industry research on product comparison best practices focused efforts to update the experience even further.

  • Since it can be hard for users to understand product information in tables, provide features to highlight differences and organize content into well-designed tables.

  • Users can find it difficult to judge compatibility of suggestions, so it is important to clearly show basics, while also providing access to more detailed specs across platforms.

  • If users can’t easily find specs that are important to them or if there is missing data, they may not consider certain products or abandon the shopping journey altogether.

Define

Project Goals

Make the spec charts easier to scan and sort.

Leverage user-generated content to improve trust.

Evaluate the quality of our data we use in compare.

How might we make it easier for customers to compare products?

Develop

Version 1.0

The initial version introduced the element of control to the customer, providing a few high-level filters.

Once the customer has selected at lease one product to compare, a generative AI summary and chart of the similarities, differences, pros, and cons is created based on customer feedback.

Also, the Specs section is shown with a menu featuring only the product specs applicable to the products being compared. From here, a customer can open specific categories of specs that are important to them.

Version 2.0

Further development of the manual compare filter added in a search field with applicable product specs already added.

This would give users an opportunity to add additional important specs to the criteria that would select comparison products for them.

The user-generated content section and the Specs filters remained the same from the first version.

Version 3.0

The next version moved the filter pills up beneath the search field to provide more space for additional high-level filters.

This would give users more options when picking the criteria that were important to compare against.

Despite the exploration into manual search and filter options that would give the user more control, these features were deemed to be too complex to build by the Engineering team given the scope of the project and were removed.

The inclusion of the user-generated content section and the Specs filters was much easier to implement into the existing compare products experience.

Deliver

75+

basis point in increase in conversion.