LaTienda is an award-winning, family-owned business supporting artisanal firms in Spain. The firm works with small family-run businesses, many of which are dedicated to centuries-old food-making traditions. With warehouses in Williamsburg, Virginia and Alicante, Spain, the company ships hundreds of thousands of orders throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. LaTienda’s brand equity is built on its fundamental commitment to the customer experience. They guarantee a positive experience for its customers – quality products delivered in excellent condition, or they will replace or refund the purchase. Overall, they had been seeing great success with their online orders, though they wanted to continue looking for opportunities to grow sales. To assist with this, they worked with WebStrategies , located nearby in Virginia.
LaTienda grouped visitors into two regions: Region A visitors were close enough to the warehouse to always get reasonable shipping costs. Region B visitors were everywhere else, and had to use a more expensive shipping method for the key product category.
WebStrategies wanted to measure the impact on sales whenever one of the key products was placed in the cart. To measure this, they installed
Event Tracking to the “Add To Cart” buttons on every product page.
They then used
Advanced Segments Custom Reports to separate visitors in Region A from Region B, and drilled down to view performance by product category. Sure enough, visitors from Region B were found to be 48% less likely to purchase if they placed an item from the key product category in their cart, which raised total shipping costs.
To combat this effect, LaTienda.com implemented a less expensive, flat rate shipping model in region B and monitored sales. After the test, the rate at which Region B visitors completed the shopping cart were found to have increased by nearly 70%.
Just to be sure, they checked to see if there was a similar increase in conversion rate for Region A visitors, and found that it did not fluctuate more than 3.4% over the same time period. The analysis confirmed that product shipping rates greatly impacted shopping cart behavior, and used data to measure the results of a key business decision.
