CRO Review: Arteza.com

Back in May, the North Miami-based art supply company Arteza was recruiting for a CRO position. I sent them my info along with a detailed site audit.

Posting my notes and observations as an example CRO audit. This is the kind of work I love.

Site search

I searched for “rhodia” who make my favorite notebooks. Arteza doesn’t carry Rhodia products:

At Divers Direct, we used site search synonyms to redirect “No results” queries to a list of relevant products. I’d recommend doing the same.

Alternately, there’s a lot of dead space on this page. Why not fill it with one of these carousels?

Departments navigation

For those departments that don’t currently have any deeper category levels, why not create some? For Brushes & Tools, it’s pretty easy to split the category into Brushes and Tools (or Cases, depending on future offerings).

My primary concern here is not forcing the visitor to make an unnecessary click.

Category page

Existing categories without subcategories still have a redundant thumbnail at the top of the category page. I’d recommend removing it to prevent customer confusion.

Alternately, following the advice under Departments Nav above, we’d break Kids’ Art Supplies down into Kids’ Painting, Kids’ Drawing, etc. (Speaking as a parent, maybe the subcategories should be Very Messy and Less Messy?)

Weekly Deals category page

These products don’t seem to be sorted — the first fou results are basically two variations of two products. At Divers Direct, we manually merchandised page 1 of our Deals page to ensure customers weren’t seeing, for example, eight wetsuits and four regulators. We wanted to show
visitors great savings on as many different top-level categories as possible.

20 products per page, on this page in particular, might be too many? Depends on how considered the merchandising decisions are.

Product detail page

Since Arteza doesn’t carry Rhodia products, I settled on a substitute: ​Hardbound Sketchbook, 8.5” x 11”, 110 sheets – pack of 2​.

I have a lot to say about this page.

Very good images, especially the lifestyle shot! ​JetPens.com​ does a great job of product photography, especially their samples of different pen types on the paper, and an aspirational photo (the strawberry watercolor).

At the top of the page, stars are in black — yet at the bottom of the page where the actual customer reviews are, the stars are yellow. A tiny bit of cognitive dissonance, probably not a big deal, but made me wonder which was the deliberate choice.

Red suddenly appears as a call-to-action color, whereas before all calls to action were in mellow gold (which shows up nicely on a black background).

Product description looks solid. The bullet copy is especially well-chosen, doing a good job of turning features into benefits.

Cart page

I can’t recommend removing Promo code from this page strongly enough. If the visitor goes down the RetailMeNot rabbithole and never completes checkout, we don’t even have their email address to send a cart abandon email. I’ve seen 15% bumps in conversion rate from simply moving the coupon code box onto the checkout page.

Checkout page

Can we minimize the Promo code box and force the customer to click it open, as it is on the Cart page? Or do we require this to remain open because it’s also apparently the method used to pay with a gift card?

My friend Cher, a body painter, only has one legal name. When she tries to purchase from Arteza, she fails validation. Do we really need this?

STRONGLY recommend defaulting Country to United States — again, no reason to force a click. (Though the address autocomplete feature is super nice.)

Recommend adding a hovering Checkout button floating on the right, because sometimes people get lost just from scrolling down a page.

Update: they listened! (sorta)

Well, Weekly Deals is now highlighted on the main nav (see below) but still, confusingly, in their second call-to-action color. (Still > 20 products represented, though.)

Honestly I’m delighted they listened, annoyed they never acknowledged my input, and curious about the decisions they made.

Site search revisions

So now when you look for something they don’t have, they at least show you what they DO have. Along with products currently out of stock, for some reason…

I checked: they let you backorder OOS products:

Note also their “we think you’ll love these” results DO vary based on your search, at least a little:

Main nav revisions

They added subcategories to Brushes & Tools like I suggested (and also added some pretty nice video snippets to the nav dropdown — I wonder whether they’re too distracting?)

Note also: previously the nav said Shop All to browse the entire category’s contents. Now it’s a more specific Shop All Brushes & Tools.

Checkout revisions

Looks like my input on their Promo Code fields made an impact…

Cart page:

Checkout page:

They added a really nice touch — a dynamic green check highlights the fields that meet validation!

Unfortunately, poor Cher can’t catch a break.

Look — you’re thinking Why does he keep going on and on about the no last name thing? At least they’re not making a customer click in two different boxes to enter first and last names separately — that’s good UX, right? That horse is dead.

I get it. Here’s the thing, though: this is a website selling art supplies. I only know a handful of people with only one name — and guess what they do? They’re all artists.

Know your customer.

And boy oh boy do they want to know their customer!!

16 trackers is — well, it’s a lot. Blocking them shaves 0.63 seconds, about 20%, from page load time. A lot of places I’ve worked with would trade a point or two of profit margin to speed their site up 0.63 seconds. Presumably, for Arteza, it’s worth the trade-off.

One last thing: when you’re using the default $categoryName parameter in your dynamically-generated featured product carousels, sometimes you get output like this: