Improved E-Commerce UX Case Study

The Brief:

Farm Marketplace has a vast range of agriculture products offered on its site, making it completely possible for a customer to get lost if there isn’t clear search or filter functionality. If they cannot find what they’re looking for quickly enough, they’re probably just going to hit the back button and start another Google search.

It is important to give users the ability to narrow down a list of products to a manageable number that meets their specific criteria. A great way to do this? Filters.

Our Work:

First, we needed to decide what filters were going to be helpful to our users. How do you find this out? A bit was common sense, but most was thanks to good ole’ keyword research. Understanding how and what users search for is going to help you understand how to filter your larger categories down into sub-categories.

To do this, several elements were considered: the number of monthly searches, the competition but also the quality of the keyword: it is obvious that the chosen keywords must be relevant to the activity and the content of the site. In some cases, subcategories were created which lead to specific pages (for instance Footwear brand pages like Nora Wellingtons).

Secondly, it was important to create features – according to the keywords – which are additional information on the product. These can be easily enabled on chosen product categories across the website and amended or disabled at any time.

Once each product was assigned its features we could then create the filter which was composed of :

• A filter category, this is a property of a product, such as its colour, brand, size or price. Each filter category often contains several values.
• A filter value: this is either a specific value (feature) of a property (e.g. “red”) or a range of values (e.g. “under €100”).

The strategy put in place

In addition to some having a nice design (i.e. bar for price and capacity), all the filters are well thought out and have a real interest for customers who are looking for a product with specific characteristics.

Our approach to filters was as follows: when well designed, they create a positive sense of control and choice, even in the presence of an overwhelming number of options. Some of the important features of the filters were:

• By Capacity or by Price (i.e. capacity or price bar on the left-hand side)

• By Brand (i.e. Farm Tyres brands) 

• By Type (i.e. different container types)

Once these optimisations were set up we could start tracking the month on month keyword ranking for specifically created new subcategories.

Just a few weeks after implementing the new filters to different categories such as Farm Tyres, Footwear and Boots, Tanks and Sprayers and others, many keywords witnessed ranking improvements. Most of them are within the top 20 search results and/or witness a great rank change of +30 up to +45.

Below we can see how individual brand pages created for Tyres ranked a few weeks after the optimisations. Product performance (item revenue) went up by 497% compared to the same time in the previous year.

Alongside on-site optimisation, when a new category was created, we supported the new pages with Facebook Ads. The work didn’t end there, as we also reviewed metadata accordingly, making sure they match on-page information and most importantly keywords.

Going Forward:

The filtering optimisations began right before summer 2021. An in-depth work allowed to lay the foundations for future filtering optimisations. The month-on-month comparison, to see how keywords are performing, will help us monitor and adjust data for better ranking.