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Melissa Cameron

Melissa Cameron

Card Discovery

How can we encourage customers to buy an additional card per session, leading to higher CVR and CPT

Timeline 2023-2024

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Project Summary

As thortful continued to grow, our existing platform had become increasingly difficult to maintain. Years of technical debt meant that even relatively small customer improvements required significant engineering effort, limiting our ability to respond to customer needs and experiment at pace.

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Alongside a company-wide proposal to migrate to a modern technology stack, I led the UX strategy for the customer experience. Rather than treating the re-platform as a like-for-like migration, I saw it as a rare opportunity to remove long-standing usability issues, modernise the shopping journey and build a scalable design system that would support product development for years to come.

Predicted Impact

Across platform incremental revenue year 1

£500K

% of customers using Apple pay

15%

Overal conversion gains

0.2ppt

Problem definition

The existing platform had reached a point where technical debt was directly impacting the customer experience. Every new feature required increasingly complex engineering effort, making it difficult to iterate quickly or deliver meaningful improvements.

While commercially the existing platform continued to perform, confidence that it could continue supporting future growth was low. Maintaining the current architecture was estimated to cost significantly more over time, whilst still limiting our ability to innovate.

Rather than simply rebuilding the existing experience, the re-platform presented an opportunity to address years of accumulated UX issues without introducing unnecessary customer disruption.

Customer Problems

Through previous usability studies, customer feedback and behavioural analytics, several recurring themes emerged.

 

  • Finding the right card was difficult

    • Customers often became overwhelmed by the volume of choice. Filtering was limited, search refinement was weak and browsing large collections required significant effort.

 

  • Too many unnecessary interactions

    • Customers were required to open an intermediate card preview before reaching product detail pages, adding additional clicks throughout browsing without providing enough value.

 

  • Greeting cards were difficult to read on mobile

    • One of the most common pieces of qualitative feedback was that text-heavy cards were difficult to preview. Customers frequently opened multiple product pages simply to read the card message.

 

  • Lack of creator storytelling

    • Independent creators are one of thortful’s biggest differentiators, yet customers rarely encountered creator content during their shopping journey.

 

  • Checkout contained unnecessary friction

    • Years of iterative changes had created a fragmented basket and checkout experience that no longer reflected modern ecommerce best practice.

Hypothesis

Because we observed that over 55% of customers left the Product Listing Page without clicking a card, we believed improving search relevance and reducing filtering friction would help customers find the right card faster, resulting in more product clicks, add-to-baskets and completed purchases, measured by improvements throughout the card discovery funnel.

Opportunity 1 - Search

Search represented one of the biggest opportunities to improve card discovery. While 30% of customers actively searched, the behaviour suggested they were struggling to find relevant results. Customers performed an average of 2.5 searches per session, often refining or rewording their query multiple times, indicating that the initial results were not meeting their expectations. More concerning, 40% of customers who searched never progressed to viewing a product, suggesting search was becoming a point of friction rather than a tool for discovery.

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Pain points:

  • Exact keyword matching

  • No guidance before searching

  • Easy to reach zero results

  • Customers repeatedly reformulate searches

  • Internal tagging doesn’t always match customer language

Ideation

Search represented one of the biggest opportunities to improve card discovery. While 30% of customers actively searched, the behaviour suggested they were struggling to find relevant results. Customers performed an average of 2.5 searches per session, often refining or rewording their query multiple times, indicating that the initial results were not meeting their expectations. More concerning, 40% of

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 Solution 1

Suggested Search 

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  • Add Apple Pay as an express payment option within checkout.

  • Allow customers to complete purchase using Apple Pay with minimal manual input.

  • Leverage stored Apple Pay shipping + billing details to reduce form completion.

Wireframes

Search represented one of the biggest opportunities to improve card discovery. While 30% of customers actively searched, the behaviour suggested they were struggling to find relevant results. Customers performed an average of 2.5 searches per session, often refining or rewording their query multiple times, indicating that the initial results were not meeting their expectations. More concerning, 40% of

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Design Direction

Search represented one of the biggest opportunities to improve card discovery. While 30% of customers actively searched, the behaviour suggested they were struggling to find relevant results. Customers performed an average of 2.5 searches per session, often refining or rewording their query multiple times, indicating that the initial results were not meeting their expectations. More concerning, 40% of

These designs show that previously if the user tapped into the search bar, nothing happened. Now it shows the user their previously searched, so they can see the types of terms they entered to find content they like

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Solution 2

Vector Search​

  • Add Apple Pay as an express payment option within checkout.

  • Allow customers to complete purchase using Apple Pay with minimal manual input.

  • Leverage stored Apple Pay shipping + billing details to reduce form completion.

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Phase 2: Apple Pay on PDP
 

  • Introduce a “Buy with Apple Pay” button directly on PDP.

  • For eligible products (e.g. single card, no add-ons), allow customers to:

    1. Tap Apple Pay

    2. Confirm shipping details

    3. Complete purchase


This bypasses basket and full checkout entirely.

This phase will be strictly A/B tested due to potential AOV impact.

The results

On Web+0.2ppt improvement to ecom conversion. Through the remainder of 2026 this is worth roughly:

  • ~3k incremental orders

  • ~£27k incremental revenue
     

Within the variant around 11% of purchases are through Apple Pay Express CheckoutOn iOS+0.5ppt improvement to ecom conversion. Through the remainder of 2026 this is worth roughly:

  • ~2.7k incremental orders

  • ~£24k incremental revenue


Within the variant about 15% of purchases are through Apple Pay Express CheckoutAcross both platforms the estimated rest-of-year impact is ~£51k incremental revenue

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