A UX case study. How do you increase AOV for Sears? How do you create a page that displays up 32 related products? By embracing premise.

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Shopping by Premise
A case study focused on how users make purchase decisions. The results may
surprise you.
Tom Elliott UX
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2. The Task
Sears needed to increase its AOV (average order value). Why?
The average Sears.com customer
visits the site just twice a year.

3. The Problem
Issues known to contribute to infrequent return visits.
Difficult Browse
With Marketplace Sellers included,
Sears offers 100,000,000 products!
Bad Fulfillment
Many orders fail to arrive and
error recovery is also bad.

4. Is there more going on?
Buying more than one product spans the UX issues of browsing (finding products),
deciding (page conversion), and product categorization (taxonomy).
Browsing
DecidingCategorization

5. Insight 1, less is more
UX research suggests people are far more decisive when judging small numbers of
products, with limited information, placed within meaningful categories.
Watch this TED talk

6. Insight 2, browsing & taxonomy
Browsing the absolute taxonomies of e-commerce sites proves difficult for users because
absolute taxonomies exist to organize stock, not present it to users.
shoes exercise
Relative Taxonomy
Presents products related to a user
interest (task focused).
Absolute Taxonomy
Finds a place for all products to
go (site focused).

7. Option 1
Employ recommended product carousels (ex: “Popular with customers”, “Goes with this
product”) throughout the site.
The catch
Employed widely on sears.com, AOV boost
was limited. Improving algorithms difficult.

8. Option 2
Improve the site’s underlying product taxonomy by supplementing it with tagging.
The catch
Very time consuming and costly to
implement for development team.
shoes
exercise comfort formalwinter
running vacation date nightwaterproof

9. Option 3
Create product bundles each based on a shopping premise aligning to likely user goals.
Pick a treadmill
Pick a shoe
Pick an MP3 player
Pick exercise equipment
Exercise Bundle

10. Early Prototype
I created several Axure prototypes to explore the interface. To work, users needed to see
the page as a single product with low-commitment configuring.

11. Challenges
Many UX and Development challenges appeared on the 8 month project.
Bundles in SR
Displaying bundles
in search results.
Availability
Users must understand
what’s available.
Relative pricing
Drives exploration
& up-sell.

12. Challenges
Many UX and Development challenges appeared on the 8 month project.
Bundles summary
The bundle’s live status,
critical for conversion.
Product selection
Drives exploration
& up-sell.

13. User Testing
I created a high-fidelity Axure prototype to support user testing. UX research had strong
concerns about relative pricing, but results were positive.
View the prototype

14. Final Design
View appliance bundles
View tool bundles
View TV bundles
View exercise bundles

15. Conclusion
The bundles project was a success, generating over $50 million it’s first year, but I noticed
something even better. It makes far more money than the product page.
$875 /product/yr
$50,000,000 revenue/yr
bundle performance
3,500 bundles
=
$40 /product/yr
$4,000,000,000 revenue/yr
product page performance
100,000,000 products
=
average 16 products/bundle

16. “Freedom of choice is what we got,
Freedom from choice is what we want.”
E-commerce seems determined to present users with an
infinite number of unrelated products, but research shows
that people choose effectively when presented limited
numbers of related products. Premise outperforms scale.
Devo
Lesson Learned