Arive Increased its Convertion Rate by Improving User Experience with the Collaboration of the Interim PMs from Product People

The Client: Arive GmbH

Arive GmbH is an e - commerce that provides clients with access to a variety of premium and lifestyle products via their website and mobile application. They specialize in offering premium goods in the sectors of beauty, home & living, fashion, and tech. Through their webshop and/or app, customers can browse and buy products from a variety of premium brands, making it simple and convenient for them to select, and buy what they want.Arive has raised $37.1m in 4 funding rounds, the last one being a Venture Road.

The Mission: Interim Product Managers

We joined Arive as interim Product Managers on the Discovery & Checkout Squad. The team had an Engineering Manager, a Development Team of 3 Developers, 1 QA, and 1 UX Designer. A Product Management role was already vacant for a few weeks when Product People came in as interim support.

Our goal was to bring the Discovery & Checkout Squad up-to-speed by discovering and delivering solutions fast for identified problems in stages of the App. We were expected to:

• Dynamically Prioritize Instant Delivery Inventory: Prioritize search results showing stores with Instant Delivery options and Open Stores over Closed Stores, and display in-stock products over out-of-stock products to Customers.
• Improve SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) Creation for Buying Team. SKU (pronounced “skew”), is used by retailers to identify and track their inventory or stock. The goal was to decrease publishing time and the costs of manual labor.
• Discover and Deliver features that increase Conversion Rate (CVR) while improving user experience - such as Granular Categories to discover products, Improved Bags/Cart on Checkout with appropriate toast notifications

Our main focus was improving conversion in the upper part of the funnel - Home screen, Listings, Search, and Product Details.

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How We Helped

Discovering The Problem

The conversion rate was observed to stagnate and not increase over time. This was of primary importance as it indicated the app’s performance was not in line with the team’s objectives. In order to address this issue, based on analysis, we focused our work on several areas. We targeted the improvement of the overall User Experience (UX) and Conversion rate.

Another discovery was the complexity of the Back Office. The overall BO work was complicated, in particular regarding the creation of SKUs and dealing with multiple internal tools. These tasks required attention to detail, cross-functional cooperation, and navigating a variety of programs and software systems. As a result, we identified key parts of the problem, and through workshops, we defined and built an optimal solution that was coherent for the implicated stakeholders.

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Deliverables on Arive Mobile App

• Granular 3-Level Categories: 65% of the Users Searched and Discovered products via categories on Arive, and there was a huge opportunity to improve the Categories offered. We liaised with the development team and stakeholders to build three-level categories for better navigation so that users can browse through Categories, Sub-Categories, and Sub-Sub Categories and easily discover products of their choice.

• Filters: With Brand and Sort Filters, users can Sort products by New-in, Lowest, and Highest Prices and filter by various brands on the App.

• Strikethrough Prices: We implemented Strikethrough Prices to show discounted products on the App, making it easier for the user to understand the discount on the products as earlier this was not communicated clearly on the App, and the users would reach out to customer support, thereby increasing the support effort. The goal was to increase the conversion rate percentage through this channel. This feature was launched during Black Friday and the Cyber 5 events. Users can now see the Normal Price, Discounted Price, and the percentage of Discount.

Inventory Management  

• SKU Creation: Arive drastically increased its available SKUs by 30% (went from 8000 to 10400, actual numbers under NDA); the current systems were time-consuming to manage a scaling inventory. We worked with internal teams - Buying Team and Data Team and built an Optimal Solution by integrating a third-party tool with Arive’s internal tool to enable the Buying team to manage the continuously growing SKU creation efficiently.

• Inventory Prioritisation: Arive’s business model is both Cloudstore and Marketplace; we liaised with the development team to build an optimal solution to prioritize inventory by product availability to maximize faster delivery and availability of products to customers. This was achieved by displaying in-stock over out-of-stock products and instant delivery over closed stores on the App.

Discovery Mini-Missions: Our Side Quests

• Improve Agile Practices in the Squad, which resulted in efficient delivery and achieving Sprint goals in the scheduled time.
• Discovery of Size and Colour Filters for Categories - Clothing, Shoes, and Accessories with the Fashion team and other stakeholders to minimize complexity and build advanced yet intuitive filters to filter by Size (T-shirt size, cm, inches, shoe size), Colour, and Stock availability, across different countries (EU, Non-EU, etc.).

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Delivered Outcomes

💡Launched key features for product discovery and checkouts like Granular Categories, Filters, and Improved Bags/Cart.

💡Introduced Strikethrough Prices for Black Friday and Cyber 5.

💡Improved Agile Processes and enabled the team to be more efficient.

💡Improved backend functions like Inventory Prioritisation and SKU creation.

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