Jewellery brand Links of London has seen a 63% increase in conversions since introducing tabbed information on product pages.

The retailer made the change after running tests based on a series of consumer exit surveys and tracking conducted by QuBit, which highlighted lack of detail or difficulty in finding information as an issue.

Ben Paris, Links of London web co-ordinator, said, “We’ve learnt that information is king. The more detail and attributes we can give around the product offering, the more educated the user is and the more likely they are to make a purchase.”

Links of London did A/B testing of tabbed compared to non-tabbed information on product pages and got lots of constructive feedback, according to Paris.

He was also keen to point out that the tests were done during the sale period which could have skewed the results, adding “if we’d done things out of sale the results might have been even more positive.”

Links of London has also made significant changes to its checkout pages as a result of testing, shortening the process and making it more intuitive to use. As part of these changes users are now alerted if they miss out any information when making a purchase.

Paris added, “It really helped in terms of reducing the number of calls into customer services. We used to get about 20 a day and we now get none. Conversion rate has also gone up as users aren’t abandoning their basket as often. We have seen a 20-25% uplift.”

The introduction of a stock availability notice has also improved the customer experience, according to Paris.

“We only used to show products that were in stock, but because we’re a jeweller we tend to have lower levels of stock compared to somewhere like Topshop. As such it meant we ran out of stock quite often so at times there was very little on the website. We’ve now put in an ‘out of stock’ message which also offers an ‘email me when back in stock’ option.”

The company has to manage these requests carefully though because if 50 people ask for stock information, but only ten items become available, it doesn’t want to email all 50 in case 40 then go to make the purchase only to find it is out of stock again.

“We’ve had to do a lot of work internally,” said Paris. “We’ve put limits on the number of emails we send out, so we’ll only send emails to the stock amount plus 10% of subscribers, based on the date of submission, so it’s first come first served.”

The retailer is currently in the process of testing out a “product slider” for selling additional items.

“Cross sells are currently below the fold so I wanted to bring something in that would hover on the screen no matter where the user was. We haven’t completed that test just yet but indications show that it will give us a 38% increase in return visitors that then convert because they are seeing a better product offering.”

Links of London has also found out more about its user base since carrying out consumer surveys and tracking user behaviour.

“We have seen some surprising results,” said Paris. “I would never have thought that Apple Mac users, for example, would be more price sensitive than non-Mac users. I don’t know if that’s just on our website but it was definitely surprising.”

The retailer had conducted some A/B testing previously, but it was based on presumptions about the site rather than user feedback.

“It was all done on what we presumed we should be testing, rather than areas we knew for a fact that consumer were finding difficult, so we didn’t get the most positive results as it was more about trial and error. Now the work we do is always completely educated.”