Get started using behavioural design to drive revenue for your ecommerce store

According to Wikipedia there are over 115 different biases that affect our decision making skills. If you have the responsibility to make your direct to consumer experience profitable, these biases open up a gold mine of opportunities.  

Scarcity Bias 

For example, today you can’t go to many travel sites without seeing messages like “Only 5 rooms left at this price on our site”, well that’s because we (humans) have a tendency to value an object more if it’s scarce. Just look at booking.com and how they use our scarcity bias to get us to perceive a booking as being of higher value.

Saliency Bias

Our biases are not only being used against us when we travel, we are also exposed to them in our day to day life. For example, The Economist is steering you to focus on what is more prominent (Salient) on their booking page, to get you to subscribe to the product with the highest margin.

Social Norms

Since the Asch conformity experiments in the 1950s, and what is often referred to as the Elevator experience, people have been fascinated with how social norms affect our day to day life. As a species, we want to conform and not to stick out. As such, we follow other people’s behaviour and norms. This is a bias that you, as a director of an ecommerce capability, can leverage to your benefit.

Conversion Rate Optimisation and Social Norms 

As mentioned, there are 100s of biases that you can use as a lever in your marketing strategy and tactics, but sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. This is where Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) comes in; working with a client of drop_, we tested the effect by making one change. We moved their “Customer Reviews” to a more prominent position on the site (far above the fold) to see how a social norm signal like Ratings could affect sales.  

Social Norms and CRO results

After running the experiment for only 2 weeks, we could already see that it was a success. With 97% confidence we could say that transactions would increase by, on average, 11% across the board.  

In real terms for a business with an average of 2,300 transactions per month and £145 order value, this small change brings in nearly £37,000 additional revenue per month, or just shy of £450,000 per year. All of this by just leveraging human behaviours in our user experience and designs.