A Dutch online bookstore came to us with the symptom every catalogue-driven webshop knows: mobile traffic that scrolled, hesitated and bounced. The product pages were the leaking joint — buy-button buried below the fold, wishlist competing for attention, key buying signals hidden until after a scroll. We rebuilt the page around a single question — what does a right-handed mobile buyer need to see in the first thumb-reach to commit — and the conversion ratio nearly doubled on the rebuilt template.
Benchmark the category, then rebuild the page around the thumb
01 · Benchmark — read the category before redrawing the page.
We mapped how the larger eTailers in the book category handle the mobile product page — and then mapped the niche bookstores separately, the ones with strong editorial identity. The two patterns converge on a few non-negotiables and diverge on the things that matter for brand. We took the convergent patterns as the baseline and let the divergent ones stay client-specific. That separation is the difference between a template lift and a redesign that still feels like the client.
When the price difference between webshops is negligible, the webshop with the most user-friendly interface wins the customer. That is the whole CRO thesis on a catalogue page.
02 · Redesign — buy-button above the fold, on the right, with the buying signals it needs around it.
The audit surfaced the usual pitfalls — buy button buried, wishlist visually competing with it, crucial buying information (price, availability, format) hidden below the fold even on mobile, disorganised information hierarchy, and a buy button parked on the left despite most users being right-handed. We redrew the page with the buying decision in the first thumb-reach: price and format visible without scrolling, buy button on the right where the thumb naturally rests, wishlist demoted to a secondary affordance.
The buying decision moves into the first thumb-reach: price and format visible without scrolling, buy button on the right where the thumb naturally rests.
03 · Checkout simplification — from add-to-cart to next step without a navigation hunt.
The product-page work only pays off if the checkout absorbs the extra adds-to-cart without leaking them again. We tightened the path from add-to-cart to the next step — fewer screens, clearer affordance for “continue”, no hunt for the next button after the cart-confirmation. The result was an add-to-cart rate up nearly 47% and the conversion rate up around 50% on the rebuilt mobile product page.
The product-page work only pays off if the checkout absorbs the extra adds-to-cart without leaking them again.
By the numbers
The headline figures the client cared about: conversion rate up around 50%, add-to-cart up nearly 47%, on the rebuilt mobile product-page template. The mechanism behind it: a buying decision the right-handed mobile user can make in the first thumb-reach, then a checkout flow that doesn’t ask them to look for the next step.
Visitor-to-buyer ratio on the mobile product page, before and after the rebuild.
When price is a tie, the webshop with the cleaner mobile product page takes the order.
Boring, predictable, attributable. That’s what good PPC looks like.
Every engagement starts with a 30-minute audit — free, no slides, just a screen-share through your account.
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