Multiple: Homepage and Search UX Overhaul with Smart Cart for Music Retailer
Hypothesis
A large product catalog music retailer's conversion losses occur primarily at the discovery and navigation stage. Redesigning the homepage to surface trending products, improving on-site search relevance, adding infinite scroll to collection pages, and implementing Smart Cart will collectively drive significant sales growth.
Test Results
Key Learning
Context: Users arriving at the multiple can't efficiently find what they're looking for, increasing bounce rates.
What was tested: Large catalog retailers lose most conversions at the product discovery stage, not at checkout. Infinite scroll on collection pages keeps mobile users engaged with product browsing longer. Smart Cart with upsell/cross-sell capabilities increases average order value alongside conversion rate. Search UX improvements (autocomplete, spelling correction, synonym handling) have outsized impact on catalog sites
Result: No statistically significant difference was detected. This null result is still valuable — it narrows the search space and helps calibrate your minimum detectable effect for future tests.
How to Apply This to Your Site
This experiment tested multiple: homepage and search ux overhaul with smart cart for music retailer but produced no statistically significant change. The test was run on a landing page page in the e-commerce industry. Inconclusive results suggest this particular change may not be a priority — focus testing effort on higher-impact areas.
Before you test: Consider that layout tests typically require adequate traffic to reach statistical significance. Run your test for at least 2 full business cycles to account for weekly traffic patterns.
What Was Tested
Rarewaves, a large online music and entertainment retailer, engaged Blend for a comprehensive CRO program. Key initiatives included homepage redesign to improve product discovery, search functionality improvements, collection page infinite scroll implementation, and Smart Cart adoption. The combined program drove a 23% increase in overall sales.
Methodology
Build On These Learnings
Save your own experiments, spot winning patterns across your test history, and stop repeating what's already been tried.
Related Experiments
Does Restructuring Plan Detail Cards Improve Click-Through?
Test the variable users actually complain about — not the variable that's easiest to redesign. This test is a textbook case of treating form when the problem is content. Cross-brand qualitative research had consistently flagged three specific confusion themes: (1) pricing structure is opaque — users can't predict what they'll pay; (2) plan names are brand-driven rather than benefit-driven, so the names themselves don't communicate what the user is buying; (3) no side-by-side comparison — vertical layouts force users to scroll and remember instead of compare in parallel. Visual hierarchy is a presentation improvement; it does nothing about pricing opacity, naming clarity, or comparison difficulty. The test reached its planned sample size and produced a directionally-negative result at the noise floor — because organizing unclear content doesn't make the content clearer. The transferable insight isn't about visual hierarchy specifically; it's about the importance of mapping qualitative complaints to the test variable. If the user research says 'I don't understand what this plan costs,' the test should manipulate cost-clarity. If it says 'I can't tell these plans apart,' the test should manipulate differentiation. Layout tests are appropriate when the complaint is about layout — not when they're a default reflex.
Restructuring Homepage Hierarchy to Surface Personalized Offers
The story behind this win is the iteration discipline. The first attempt at this homepage redesign changed two systems at once (messaging + routing) and produced an ambiguous result: the entry metric moved slightly positive while downstream metrics moved meaningfully negative. The team correctly identified that the routing change — which inadvertently replaced direct links to a personalized plan-search experience with modal-driven entry into a generic flow — was the downstream killer. The iteration restored the original routing and kept ONLY the homepage hierarchy changes. All funnel metrics moved directionally positive in lockstep (entry +2.38%, mid-funnel +7%, conversion +11.81%) — none stat-sig individually but consistent enough across the funnel to justify shipping. Element-level diagnostics confirmed the mechanism: the segment CTAs the team intended to promote saw a 26-30% lift in unique-visitor interaction, while the unchanged hero banner stayed flat (as expected). Two key behavioral observations: (1) page-length reduction surfaced a 4x lift on a previously buried bottom-of-page zip code input — proving the secondary lesson that 'less page' can mean 'more conversion real estate'; (2) desktop strongly outperformed mobile, with the suspected cause being mobile's lead-with-form pattern (zip code above hero) — putting the form before the message creates friction. The broader transferable insight: when a messy test confounds multiple variables, the right move is to isolate one variable in the next test, not to abandon the hypothesis.
Content Page: Maybe Later on Content Page
Context: Key actions on the content page disappear as users scroll, creating a gap between intent and the ability to act.
Checkout: Multiple Steps
Problem: Friction during the checkout process causes users to abandon right when they're closest to converting.