Growth HackHow Ecwid increased Expansion MRR by 21.3%

Ecwid enable physical stores to open an online shop. Kind of like what Shopify does.

Measure

Ecwid had a long onboarding flow. Users would register their store and have to add products e.t.c. At the end of the flow, Ecwid offered paid upgrades.

Customers were having trouble completing the entire onboarding process.

Find the bottleneck

Customers would only see the upsell offers when the fully completed the onboarding. More users would see the upsell offers if the onboarding flow completion rate could be increased.

I am not sure what Ecwid’s conversion rate of “user saw upgrade offers” to “user accepted upgrade offers” was, but that could be the next bottleneck.

Experiment

Ecwid were using a progress bar to show users how far through the onboarding process they were. It was a little inaccurate though, after account registration (the first step), the progress bar would show 0%.

Ecwid ran an experiment where they changed the progress bar to show 15% after an account was created. This was both more accurate and also made the user feel like they had made more progress.

People who feel like they have already made progress are more likely to put in more effort. This is the Endowed Progress Effect.

Ecwid’s experiment showed a 21% increase in expansion MRR.

Looking forward

If user onboarding to upgrade purchase is still the MRR bottleneck for Ecwid, then there are a few more things that they could look at:

  • What is their conversion rate of “user saw upgrade offers” to “user purchased an upgrade offer”. Increasing this will further increase their expansion MRR.
  • Are there other ways to speed up or automate onboarding e.g. through automation. If there customers are coming from another platform like Shopify, then they could build an auto-importer. “Import from spreadsheet” might be useful for brick and mortar stores. Talking to customers is important here though.
  • What happens if the upgrade offers are shown before onboarding? More customers would see the offers, but the conversion rate might be different.
  • Could they make more use of the Endowed Progress Effect? Are there steps before registration that they could add as “completed” when someone first sees that onboarding progress bar.