Reed Iredale

Category: Uncategorised

  • Why ASOS Removed Their Bestseller Badges (And Sales Jumped)

    ASOS tested removing “Bestseller” and “Popular” badges from product listings.

    Badges created comparison anxiety. Shoppers clicked badged items, then felt overwhelmed by choice. “If this is the bestseller, why are there 47 other options?” Paradox of choice kicked in. Browse time went up, purchases went down.

    They stripped badges from category pages and only showed them on product detail pages after someone had already committed to clicking.

    Conversion from category page to purchase increased 8%. Less noise, faster decisions.

  • The “Free Shipping” Bar That Backfired

    An outdoor gear brand added a progress bar showing how much more customers needed to spend for free shipping: “You’re $23 away from FREE SHIPPING!”

    Sounds smart. But the bar appeared after add-to-cart, creating instant sticker shock. Customers didn’t think “I’ll add more” – they thought “this is getting expensive” and bounced to compare prices elsewhere.

    They moved the free shipping threshold to the product page as static text and removed the progress bar entirely. No surprises at checkout.

    Cart abandonment dropped 12%. Average order value stayed flat – but more people actually completed purchase.

  • How Amazon’s “Ugly” Add-to-Cart Button Destroys Beautiful Competitors

    Amazon’s product pages look cluttered and dated. Competitors redesign with sleek, minimal layouts. Amazon keeps winning.

    That bright orange “Add to Cart” button isn’t pretty – it’s a 20-year-trained behaviour. Users don’t think. They see orange, they click. Cognitive load drops to zero. “Clean” designs make users hunt for the button.

    Amazon tested button colours, placement and size obsessively. The current design isn’t an accident – it’s the survivor of thousands of A/B tests where conversion beat aesthetics every time.

    Amazon converts at roughly 13% (74% for Prime members). Most e-commerce sites sit at 2-3%. Ugly is profitable.

  • The $300,000,000 Button

    Best Buy’s checkout had a “Register” button before payment. Customers had to create an account to buy.

    The form triggered instant friction. First-time buyers didn’t want a relationship – they wanted a bike rack. Forcing registration felt like a trap. Cart abandonment was haemorrhaging revenue.

    They replaced “Register” with “Continue as Guest” and added a simple line: “You don’t need an account to checkout. But you can create one after to track your order.”

    $300 million in additional revenue in the first year. Same checkout. Same products. One button.

  • Unvetted Testing Tools Hurt Your Revenue

    When you’re wanting to test new ab testing tools on your website, you have all sorts of options, you will usually stick to one of the big ones, try and up and coming one, or just take the risk and build some shonky AI built setup (which I’ve thought about several times).

    You can lose out on revenue just by testing. So before you test, make sure it performs well, has low overhead, and your tests are super lightweight too.

    Because you can go months with lagging revenue so do an A vs NA test over a period with and without your testing tool just to see.

    You might end up like me and find your testing tool is a massive piece shit, even if it says it’s a native to the platform you’re using.

  • $$$ vs $ – The New High and Low Price Signalling

    Last week I was driving down New Settlement Road and drove past a car on the side of the road. The window had painted phone number up top and a $ sign of the same typography size just below. And I thought to myself, “hmm, must be in need of cash”.

    My brain has seen this signal all over the internet, it’s a quick and easy explainer on what you should expect from a price.

    $ – low price, $$ – medium price, $$$ – high price.

    Could this explain the hollowing out of mid-tier products?

  • Pricing is Underrated

    You probably set your pricing and forget about it. Commercial airliners change their pricing 11,000,000 times per day.

    Uber has an insanely complicated pricing system that takes into account distance, demand and experience. They’re just an app which is an improvement on taxies.

    What do you sell? And how many different price options do you have?

  • How I’ve Used The Pratfall Effect

    When I was working on a Pet Food brand in 2020, I came across a great little defensive design (also named The Pratfall Effect) technique in email marketing.

    Using The Pratfall Effect you can make yourself come off more likeable when you make a mistake.

    So when I made an email welcome sequence, I realised an interesting win when I actually made a mistake in one of the emails.

    This mistake made a customer frustratingly mad, so I decided to keep the mistake, but once we told him we’d fix that, we knew he would never go through that process ever again, but he felt like he got a win by fixing a small business error.

    If you do this, you have the opportunity to make better, long-term customers, but simply don’t use this on everyone because it comes off as untrustworthy. So in one email most would skim over, this rare issue gave us an incremental nudge to revenue.

  • The Ellsberg Paradox

    In decision theory and economics, ambiguity aversion (also known as uncertainty aversion) is a preference for known risks over unknown risks. An ambiguity-averse individual would rather choose an alternative where the probability distribution of the outcomes is known over one where the probabilities are unknown.

    This behaviour was first introduced through the Ellsberg paradox (people prefer to bet on the outcome of an urn with 50 red and 50 black balls rather than to bet on one with 100 total balls but for which the number of black or red balls is unknown).

    There are two categories of imperfectly predictable events between which choices must be made: risky and ambiguous events (also known as Knightian uncertainty). Risky events have a known probability distribution over outcomes while in ambiguous events the probability distribution is not known. The reaction is behavioural and still being formalised. Ambiguity aversion can be used to explain incomplete contracts, volatility in stock markets, and selective abstention in elections (Ghirardato & Marinacci, 2001).

    The concept is expressed in the English proverb: “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

    Citations:

    Wikipedia: Ambiguity Aversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity_aversion#:~:text=This%20behavior%20was%20first%20introduced,or%20red%20balls%20is%20unknown).

  • Follow-Up Funnels

    I had a fun discussion with my accountant’s dental client last week. He enquired about doing some pre M&A work.

    He does a ‘paid clean + check up’ as a loss leader productised offer and that’s what he sends his traffic to.

    He started losing money on his offer and was starting to think he might stop running ads to the offer as the rest of his business was doing well.

    I stopped him.

    How much is the lifetime value of the customers that come through the offer?

    He said he didn’t know. So I told him to go to his dental business software and send me his sales data.

    He sent me his excel sheet in an email with customer ID column. In Pandas I can do a groupby function and filter by that ID that came through on the ad offer.

    He was attributing spend to the offer and not the CLV. So the goal he should have is having a customer for life and not the math of the moment (his ad spend).

    If he keeps following-up with phone calls and email he would have a comfortable 1000% return on ad spend (aka 10x ROAS).