How the crisis helped two guys come up with a new service for online stores

Hello, dear readers of "Megamind"!

This story is about how a sharp decline in sales in January 2015 helped the marketer and developer to create a product that went to self-sufficiency without investing in advertising.
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HucksterBot (from English "merchant, shopkeeper") is a new way to increase the conversion, sales and gross profit of an online store. A special widget offers discounts and successfully sells products only to those segments of users who do not buy well - mobile users, people who come through advertising channels, regional traffic.

History of creation

The founders of the project (Nikita Tsukanov and Alexey Solonkov) worked for many years in major online stores of the country (one was engaged in marketing and development, the other - in development). After December 2014, sales fell sharply after rush demand for obvious reasons.

The guys had an interesting experience of large sales - if you put honest discounts in the presence of a good range of goods, the conversion in the sales period reached 15%, sales could grow 5 times. Such indicators were achieved dozens of times. A simple conclusion was made - if the conversion can grow 3 or more times against discounts, then why not give discounts to certain low conversion segments of users and not lose gross profit? At an online store with a total conversion of 2%, traffic from the regions can show a conversion of only 0.2%, and raising it 3 times, even with the discount, the store will still earn more. So the idea of ​​service was born.

From February to October 2015, without any advertising and PR service (Nikita personally “knocked” on the online stores and offered to try the product), the first customers gathered a pool, significant traffic appeared and the product started to improve continuously, conducting A / B testing.

We have been testing and selecting the optimal variant of the widget with a high conversion rate for quite a long time. We conducted more than 30 A / B tests, made many discoveries. For example, flashing the cursor in the phone's input field increases the conversion rate by 25%. An increase in the font with the size of discounts led to an increase in conversion by 15%, a change in the header with call-to-action by 7%, the color of the button did not affect the conversion in any way. And there are a lot of such conclusions. Here we are constantly looking for something new that will allow our customers to increase the conversion of their traffic, making a minimum of effort. The most difficult thing is to achieve the effect of a personal offer.

On the technical side, the most difficult thing was to assemble the beautiful architecture of the system so that it was productive and stable. It was also difficult to choose exchange protocols. As a result, we got a non-standard architecture and we achieved excellent speeds: a widget for a unique user with a unique set of products and discounts is generated in real time for 1ms, everything works completely asynchronously and does not load the site at all.

Nikita Tsukanov, co-founder of the service .

As a result, at the end of November, HucksterBot connected already 30 paying customers, the service began to pay for itself. On December 1, a full-fledged team was formed (where your humble servant also entered) and the product was put into commercial operation.

Case As an online store increased conversion by 60%

Today, every second new service claims that it improves conversion and sales. All this is already read something like this - "our service will increase your conversion by 20 centimeters for free and without registration." Therefore, instead of the story that HucksterBot has a lot of advantages and increases all possible business indicators, we will provide a client case with real numbers.

“Garden Machines” is a retail network selling garden equipment. Founded in 1992, the leader in the St. Petersburg market. Since 2008, the online store Snail.ru has been operating, which today attracts up to 4,000 visitors per day.

Tasks

In 2015, the company had two important tasks:

• Increase sales in the regions (according to Google Analytics, conversion in regions where the network has no offline stores was 6 times lower than in St. Petersburg).
• To increase the conversion of mobile traffic (in 2014 it was 7 times lower than the conversion on desktops).

The company decided to test the hypothesis - the provision of personalized discounts to certain segments of visitors (regional, mobile advertising channels that came through advertising channels) will increase the conversion and gross profit of the store.

Decision

HucksterBot turned out to be a suitable tool for testing the hypothesis. The service solved all the tasks, was implemented in 2 days, did not require to make changes to the site and develop a separate pricing for the regions. The implementation took place in March 2015.

results

• As of December 2015, 30-35% of site visitors interact with the HucksterBot widget, the average conversion into a request from the widget is 6.5%, in the regions 70% of orders are done through the widget.
• A comparison of sales for 2014 and 2015 showed that an increase in the average discount in the regions from 5.11% to 8.5% (with a general decrease in the average discount) and a personalized approach to the segment led to a 2.7 times increase in gross profit from regional sales and an increase in turnover of 3 times. At the same time, regional traffic grew by only 52%.
• A new approach to discounts has increased the overall conversion of the online store (conversion into orders through the basket, phone and widget HucksterBot) by 60%.
  
  
• The conversion of advertising channels to attract traffic has multiplied (conversion to orders with Avito Context increased almost 6 times after providing discounts for this segment).
• The total conversion into orders from tablets increased 2.9 times, from smartphones - 4.6 times, mobile traffic began to be converted in the same way as traffic from desktops. Note that the performance of mobile traffic is also equally influenced by the development of adaptive site design.

With the help of HucksterBot, we successfully solve the problem of selling illiquid goods, increase sales in the regions, greatly increased sales of spare parts and discounted equipment. Hidden personalized discount works much more efficiently than large short-term sales.

Alexander Borisov, Project Manager Snail.ru

If you want to know the details of the implementation of HucksterBot and details about the results obtained (with analytics numbers and graphs), here is the full case of Snail.ru .

Friends, ready to answer any questions in the comments, write!