That freedom of choice can make the difference is proven by this award-winning case of Beter Bed. Together with the team of Beter Bed, Online Dialogue won the award in the category ‘Conversion’ during the DDMA Dutch CRO Awards. We would like to congratulate the entire Beter Bed team and in particular our colleagues Bas Boland, Yuran van den Bosch, Lotte Cornelissen, Anouk Erens, Shirley van Haalem, Isabella Klaassens, Naomi Smulders and Marcel Stommel with this great award!

About Beter Bed

Beter Bed has been an expert in sleep for over 35 years. Beter Bed believes that everyone can sleep better, helps customers make the right choices and makes customers happy with their service. Beter Bed is there online and in stores to help everyone get a better night's sleep with the long-term goal of making everyone healthier, fitter and better. 

Usage survey results: choice overload

Qualitative usage studies showed that there was a need for consumer choice in terms of delivery date. On the other hand, web data showed that there was a high exit rate in the last step of checkout. We saw that customers showed uncertain behavior: there was a long time on page, high exits and low CTR and CR. Choosing a delivery time took a lot of cognitive effort and caused choice overload: because people were faced with many options, they had difficulty making a decision. Our goal was to simplify choosing delivery dates while maintaining a sense of choice. 

This led to the following hypothesis: If we reduce the cognitive effort required when choosing the delivery date, the final step of the checkout can be completed more smoothly. As a result, we observe lower exit rates and higher conversions. 

A/B testing

After the qualitative research, the resulting insights were turned into several A/B tests. These 6 tests are follow-up tests: we expanded on previous learnings to strengthen the results. Between fall 2019 and summer 2022, the 6 variants were tested. 

In the first 4 variants, we tested to reduce the delivery dates to 3 options, introduce a tooltip to better highlight ‘choose other date,’ display the delivery dates more easily, and eliminate all choices by offering one delivery date. 

After testing the first 4 variants, we concluded the following:

• Immediately showing multiple delivery dates leads to choice stress or even choice paralysis. 
• Although people explicitly say they want autonomy over the delivery date, they implicitly show that this is not always the case. 
• Removing the choice of delivery date worked extremely well. However, we did see an increase in the number of logins to the order status to change the delivery date as a result.

Customers thus converted better, but were not actually better served in all cases. These results showed that there are two target groups: people who are satisfied with the delivery date imposed by Beter Bed, and people who like to have some additional options to choose the delivery time themselves. The challenge here was: how can we bundle this into one checkout? 

The solution: splitting customers into two segments

The outcomes and learnings of all previous tests finally led to Variant 6. Here, traffic was split into 2 segments: short-term ( 2 weeks). Short-term visitors want to choose their own delivery date and thus need autonomy. Long-term visitors benefit from a set delivery date, leading to less choice paralysis. The tests of variant 6 led to a strong positive effect on conversions (+4.5%), with exit remaining the same. In this way, both target groups (short- and long-term) were helped. 

So after much testing and experimentation, our data confirms that consumers need to have freedom of choice in delivery date when delivery is up to 7 days. For longer delivery terms, we communicate the first possible delivery date that can only be changed via mail. By doing so, we give customers autonomy and choice in the short term, while customers do not face choice paralysis in the long term. 

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