Case study

Increasing ecommerce back-to-school sales by 23% for School Trends 

Improving the on-site experience to increase conversions

  • 18% increase

    in customers using the school search

  • 17% increase

    in customers getting from product page to checkout

  • 23% increase

    increase in checkout completion

At a glance

School Trends is the UK’s leading school uniform supplier, delivering to a dedicated customer base of 2000 schools and direct to parents. Their website allows users to purchase uniform and sports kit, either plain or embroidered with the school logo. 

With a legacy website making development changes expensive and time-consuming, they wanted to find a more agile solution to testing and updating the on-site experience to increase conversions. 

School Trends engaged Ratio to identify opportunities to improve the customer journey from product search through to checkout, reduce drop-out, and maximise sales during their high traffic volume period.

It was particularly important to get the first journey experiments in place for their first peak season trading period of the year.

How Ratio Partners approached the project

With limited time, Ratio first undertook a workshop to fully understand the intricacies of users purchasing through individual school pages on the website, and then entered a short, sharp journey analysis phase where we reviewed each page and identified where users were stalling or becoming confused, and drew up a backlog of experiments where we believed changes would deliver the most impact. 

Having implemented VWO to conduct the experiments, we focused down on the initial school search bar, bringing it up the homepage to make it more obvious to users as their starting point.  

We then redesigned the product page entirely within VWO to change up the product size widget, include more information about sizing and delivery, and streamline the content structure to make it more readable. 

Finally, we redesigned the checkout experience to consolidate information and call-to-actions in a format that was easier to understand, and bringing in final proof points around delivery to encourage final purchase. 

We tested all of this rapidly using the peak season period traffic volumes, then switched the experiments to run to 100% once we saw statistical significance of uplift in conversions, making further recommendations for future development and experimentation