Flos USA Lifts Checkout Conversion 125% with Full-Funnel A/B Optimization

Background

Flos USA, a niche luxury lighting ecommerce site serving the US and Canada, struggled with low checkout conversion rates. The company lacked the internal resources and expertise to build a structured optimization program. In May 2017, it engaged VWO Services to manage end-to-end funnel optimization.

What Was Implemented

• Behavioral research using VWO heatmaps, scrollmaps, and session recordings across all funnel stages
• 30 A/B campaigns run over 17 months, each hypothesis grounded in quantitative and qualitative data
• Homepage: navigation layout redesign to improve category discoverability
• Product listing page: added CTA buttons to listing tiles
• Product page: replaced dropdown color selector with visible color swatches
• Cart page: stripped non-essential information, simplified layout
• Full implementation handled by VWO Services team, minimizing internal resource requirement

Results

Over 17 months, the sequential funnel optimization program produced a 125% increase in Flos USA's checkout conversion rate and an 18× ROI from the overall CRO program. Stage-level gains included 86% more revenue from the product listing page, 19.35% lift in add-to-cart from the product page, and 36.97% higher add-to-cart rate from the cart page. The program is described by VWO as one client success story; all figures are vendor-reported for a single client.

Lessons

• Full-funnel optimization outperforms checkout-only fixes: the largest gains came from listing and cart pages, not the checkout screen itself
• Behavioral analytics (heatmaps, session recordings) are essential to generating testable hypotheses grounded in actual user behavior
• Outsourcing test implementation to a specialist team allowed rapid iteration without internal headcount investment
• Sequential, stage-by-stage testing compounds: each funnel stage improvement feeds volume into the next stage