Atropa: roughly 14 times more online orders, with no ads

The starting point

Atropa sells car care and home cleaning products in Slovenia (atropa-shop.si) and Croatia (atropa.hr). Its store was a WordPress site built in-house, and it was making about one online sale a week.

First: the move to Shopify

I moved the store to Shopify. Conversion rose to about 1.8%. That was better than the old site, but still too low.

I also took a shortcut. Google rankings were already poor, so there was little to protect. To save time, I redirected the old pages to the new home page instead of mapping each one. On a store with real search traffic to lose, I’d map every page.

Then: the redesign

With the store on Shopify, I worked on four things.

The first screen. This got the most attention, because it’s where visitors decide whether to stay. The home page now opens with a clear promise, a shop button and the accepted payment methods, all before any scrolling.

Navigation and scanning. The menu now goes straight to the product groups, such as car care, home cleaning and disinfectants. Pages are easier to skim, so people can find a product without reading everything.

A smaller range. Together we cut a lot of products, so there was less to wade through.

Product images and SEO. I reworked the product imagery and the SEO of the product pages.

The result

Online orders are now roughly 14 times what the old store took. No ads were running before or after.

The redesign took conversion from about 1.8% to 3.1%, and it has stayed above 3% in the few months since. Compared with before the redesign, revenue is up by more than 10%.

What else changed

The redesign numbers need some context. Traffic dropped after we cut so many products, which is why revenue rose by less than conversion. A smaller audience can lift conversion on its own, so revenue is the number I’d judge the redesign by.

Prices and delivery costs also went up. That helped revenue, and it could easily have hurt conversion. It didn’t.

What you can take from it

Atropa still isn’t running ads. If it starts, that traffic will land on a store that converts above 3%. If your store barely sells, that’s usually a better place to begin than a bigger ad budget.