How Steadyrack Made Its Most Expensive Rack the Bestseller in 6 Months

Before the program, a visit that began on the premium ProFlex product page was worth less than half a visit that began on the cheaper Classic MTB page. In their own sales data, the premium rack’s page was the weakest rack page on the site despite being the newest and best product.

And the funnel stage breakdown said the same thing.

Ninety-six of every hundred visitors left without putting anything in the cart at all. People arrived, looked, and could not decide, or figure out what was right for them.

Surveys, heatmaps, session recordings, support tickets, mined reviews and the funnel itself all converged on the same confusion: which rack do I need?

Seventeen percent of support tickets were sizing questions, people asking the business what the website should have answered. Eighty percent of returns came from people who had been confused about sizing and space. Session recordings and user tests showed size buttons being ignored on the collection page, with add-to-cart possible without making a choice about sizing at all.

The ProFlex range came in three variants named Narrow, Wide and Fat. Those are brand names that describe the rack, not the bike. To find out which one fitted their bike, a buyer had to click through to a separate, detailed explainer page, which only about 5% of users did. That page told them to go and check their bike’s tyre size and compare it against a chart.

We simplified it dramatically. Every test that won put the answer in the buyer’s own language, without asking them to do anything: lead with the bike they ride, which dictates the size they need. We tested that idea on the collection page, the product page, the filters, the cart drawer and the homepage. All five came back as a win.

Splitting ProFlex into three bike-type products on the collection page (instead of just one SKU) changed the product mix and lifted ProFlex orders 28 percent. A “best suited for” line above the variant selector lifted ProFlex conversion 24 percent. Bike-type filter buttons lifted conversion 8 percent and revenue per visitor 10 percent. Repeating the same line in the cart drawer lifted conversion 8.7 percent. Splitting the racks out in the homepage best sellers lifted it 9.6 percent. You get the picture.

Detail overwhelmed the customer. People exited buying mode, and went into analysis mode. A modal that asked buyers to measure their tyre lost, and lost badly. Have the detail available for anyone who goes looking, but keep it off the page where the decision happens.

Trust surprisingly turned out not to be a lever here. Steadyrack has sold over 1 million racks worldwide and the brand carried that weight already. Repeated attempts to add trust signals did nothing, and sometimes did worse than nothing.

What changed was which rack people picked, and that is what the tests were built to do.

Run through our statistical model, which corrects for seasonality and for results that got statistically lucky, the wins so far come back at roughly a 10x return on our fee. That is North American markets only, and the winning tests have since been hardcoded across all three markets they operate in.

These first six months we’ve prioritised unblocking the path to purchase: clarity, less confusion, a cleaner UX. Getting out of the buyer’s way.

The next step is twofold: first, iterate further on the winning levers, and second, move the program to the motivation side, raising the visibility of the reasons someone would buy.