🧾 High conversion rates with guided selling: fact or fiction?

Customers who use a product finder convert much better than website visitors who don't receive any product advice.

• sometimes 40% better,
• or 138% better,
• but also 331% better,
• 500% better,

Or even 2000% (yes, really).

A common comment about these results is “that's not fair, those who use a product finder have more intention of buying anything anyway”.

In other words, there is a selection bias: visitors who want to buy something are more likely to use a product finder and therefore convert better.

Great suggestion — but the reality is quite different!

Helping customers really helps: A/B-testing conversion rates

We are the first to admit that comparing different groups (guided selling users vs. non-users) can give a distorted picture. What such a comparison only helps us to effect to understand the user's decision aid, in other words: how do users behave after going through a decision aid?

For the total impact we should not only look at the effect, but also the reach of the decision aid. Because no matter how well you convert decision aid, if only 1 in 100 customers uses it, the impact will be minimal. We have written about this in detail before: Maximize the impact of your guided selling apps.

To understand the impact, many of our customers have split traffic A/B tests performed. Simply, the way it should be: 50% get version A (e.g. a PLP without a decision aid) and 50% percent get version B (the same PLP with decision aid). This has been done over the past two years by many customers in different time periods and a large amount and diversity of product categories.

The conclusion is unambiguous: web shops convert better with decision aids than without decision aids. This applies to the lister page (PLP) but also for the product detail page (PDP), like in this Toppy example:

Why a higher e-commerce conversion with a product finder?

The store as a whole therefore performs better when customers have the option to use a product findr. How come?

Well, it's actually quite simple. This is because most websites are designed for the “man on a mission”, the person who already knows exactly what he wants to buy. For this visitor, the white glove treatment is reserved and all signals are green towards the checkout. But this type of visitor represents only a (very) small proportion of all visitors to an online store.

Whether your conversion rate is 1%, 2%, 3%, or even 8%, the vast majority of your visitors don't buy, even though they're not coming to your site for fun.

The average website visitor is unsure about something. They want to buy something, they just don't know exactly what. And to find out, they can explore a whole heap of products, information and specifications themselves, but without (personal) help. The responsibility for making the right choice lies entirely with the customer. And this doesn't work!

Only when an online store chooses to treat these doubting customers as king is a radically higher conversion on the horizon.

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