We worked with a Dutch online bookstore whose audience skewed older than the e-commerce playbook is written for — the largest single age bucket was 55-64, with over-45s the clear majority, and women dominating the buyer mix. Two pieces of work followed. First a mobile product-page rebuild that lifted product-page conversion by close to 85%. Then a counterintuitive checkout-rebuild that added steps where every CRO blog tells you to remove them, and lifted checkout conversion by close to 50%. Both moves were driven by who was actually buying, not by what the templates said should work.
Start from who’s actually buying. Let that rewrite the template.
01 · Audience read — the buyer profile, not the playbook, sets the brief.
Before either redesign we read the analytics properly. The audience was older than the e-commerce defaults assume — over-45s in the clear majority, the 55-64 bucket the largest single group, 65+ in third place, and women dominating the buyer mix. That demographic profile carries different reading habits, different scrolling behaviour, and a different relationship to digital friction than the 25-44 segment most CRO advice is calibrated for.
The standard e-commerce intuition — make every page lighter, faster, shorter — is calibrated for an audience this client did not have. We treated the demographic as a constraint to design from, not a footnote to optimise around.
02 · Mobile product page — rebuilt against how the actual buyer reads.
The first piece of work was the mobile product page. We rebuilt the layout against how this audience actually scans a product — larger typography, clearer hierarchy between cover, title, author and price, less competing colour, and a more confident add-to-cart placement. The two relationships we tracked closely afterwards in Google Analytics: products-added-to-cart vs. product-detail views, and sales vs. product-detail views. Both moved in the same direction. Conversions on the product page lifted by close to 85% and add-to-cart actions by almost 47%, against the same traffic mix.
A redesign benchmarked against how the actual buyer reads, not against the template.
03 · Checkout — adding steps on purpose.
We rebuilt the checkout the other way — more steps, each one with less on it, each one with a clear single decision. Fewer items in view at any moment, more visible progress between them, more sense of being walked through rather than rushed through. Checkout completion lifted by close to 50%.
Two redesigns, one underlying move: the textbook was written for a buyer this client didn’t have, and the work began the moment we stopped applying it.
The default CRO advice for checkout is to compress: fewer fields, fewer pages, one-click where possible. For a 55-64-skewed audience buying books, the opposite turned out to hold.
By the numbers
The product-page work lifted mobile conversion by close to 85% and add-to-cart actions by almost 47%. The checkout work, building the flow the opposite way to convention, lifted checkout completion by close to 50%. Same store, same traffic, same audience — different design assumptions about who the audience was.
Checkout flow, the counterintuitive move: where convention says compress, this audience converted better being walked through than rushed through.
The biggest CRO wins usually start with reading the audience properly, not with applying the template harder.
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.
Book the audit →