Optimising PDPs to reduce the exit rate by up to 8% and increase the ATB rate by up to 50%

Paid marketing users landing on a Product Detail Page (PDP) had an extremely high exit rate. This represented a major inefficiency in customer acquisition, leading to increased customer acquisition costs (CAC) and low conversion rates.

Before: October 2024

A/B/C test: January 2025

Updated legacy: April 2025

Goal

The objective was to decrease the PDP exit rate, increase the Add to Basket (ATB) rate, and ultimately improve checkout conversion. Additionally, reducing CAC was a key goal to improve the return on investment (ROI) of paid marketing efforts.

Actions

Understanding user behaviour: surveyed paid marketing users visiting PDPs to better understand their shopping intent, reasons for exiting and not purchasing items, and their level of trust in NOTHS as a brand.

Develop assumptions and hypotheses: based on insights from the surveys and internal analytics data, I have worked on developing multiple assumptions and hypotheses together with the PM.

Experimental work: taking a lean approach to working in order to be able to quickly test whether our assumptions were correct, I have created multiple iterations of the PDP over the course of a few months. The changes ranged from layout optimisation to content formatting or interaction design optimisation and were implemented either as JDI (Just do it) or temporary A/B/C tests.

Results

Exit rate: By April 2025, the exit rate has decreased by 4.5% on average year on year (YoY) and up to almost 8% in peak periods (i.e. ahead of special events/holidays such as Christmas or Valentine's Day).

Add to Basket rate: By April 2025, the ATB rate was -20% YoY before the project started, it increased by 15% on average YoY, and even went up to over 30% in peak periods.

Conversion rate: Increased CVR of products with 0 reviews by 3-4% (since introducing Brand ratings).

Trust in NOTHS: Increased the trust in NOTHS for 40-50% of the customers.

Improved user experience: overall, the PDP layout has been optimised to reduce unnecessary noise from the experience, offer consistency, and display information in a way which makes it discoverable if and when needed and is easy to consume.

Improved performance: having to implement all these changes required the engineering team to re-build the PDP layout, which allowed them to optimise the code and improve page speed and SEO performance.

Add to Basket rate: By April 2025, the ATB rate was -20% YoY before the project started, it increased by 15% on average YoY, and even went up to over 30% in peak periods.

Conversion rate: Increased CVR of products with 0 reviews by 3-4% (since introducing Brand ratings).

Trust in NOTHS: Increased the trust in NOTHS for 40-50% of the customers.

Add to Basket rate: By April 2025, the ATB rate was -20% YoY before the project started, it increased by 15% on average YoY, and even went up to over 30% in peak periods.

Conversion rate: Increased CVR of products with 0 reviews by 3-4% (since introducing Brand ratings).

Trust in NOTHS: Increased the trust in NOTHS for 40-50% of the customers.

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Before and after

Page layout in October 2024 (not showing app-related banners and similar items carousel above the product)

Some elements had unnecessary white space, and others were very tall (e.g. personalisation options), increasing the scroll and cognitive load.

Delivery information was confusing and users thought they could click on the options due to its design.

A/B/C test: In January 2025 we tested a new layout with various UI improvements: placed Search behind a tap, updated design for Brands' information to increase customer awareness that NOTHS is a marketplace of small UK brands.

A/B/C test (cont.): Better product rating scores, highlighting product features, a more compact layout using progressive disclosure principles to reduce users' cognitive load.