The First 48
CampPak’s New Pricing
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When Daniel Tsinis and I launched CampPak a few days ago our basic idea of our MVP was this:
Explain the experiences → Link to Contact Us page → Figure out pricing and how to bill if we got any requests → Profit
With a modest goal of getting a single booking in the first two weeks, we weren’t too dejected not to book anything right away; then we got the following email from a customer:
Later that day, my friend sends the following message which was another red flag:
After getting the email and subsequent text, I decide to check the stats. To check drop-offs, I know that the Behavior Flow would be my friend. At first glance, I am pretty pleased: our conversion from home page to ‘Experiences’ (which described the packages we offered; the two different /experiences/ URLs was also fixed) is nearly 40%, which is strong for an unknown service.
Excitedly, over 31% of traffic makes it to the Contact Us page, which at the time was our last step in the funnel. My friend’s experience proved not to be unique however, we have a 95% drop-off rate (really 97.4% drop-off considering one test conversion).
We know at once that we have to make a change — we have to tackle pricing.
What are the challenges which prevented us from a simple flow?
- We don’t know what gear customers may already have, and therefore not need
- We don’t know how long gear would be needed for, and we need to price accordingly
- With individual gear selection, there will be lots of variants, requiring individual product creation
So after a day of experimenting and working within the limitations of a WYSIWYG e-commerce platform, we settle on our next iteration:
Explain the experiences and duration selection → Select pre-built package or DIY selection → Select add-ons → Check-out → Profit
In order to work within the confines of the platform and to provide a good user experience, we implement the following:
- We preset package lengths to either a weekend or full week (inclusive of both weekends), this lets us price statically for what would likely be the most popular options without worrying about adjusting pricing for every length trip
- Instead of endless drop-down menus we decide to have only a ‘full’ or DIY package, and we build an Add-Ons page
- Our platform doesn’t allow us to use a single ‘Duration’ field, so in the interest of user experience* we have only a package duration which impacts pricing and add-ons pricing is static
- Add-ons are priced such that renting a ‘full’ package will always be cheaper than individually adding the constituent add-ons
- To prevent someone trying to rent just a single add-on and asking for door-to-door delivery and pickup, we added a shipping price, as well as free shipping over $65 which currently corresponds to our cheapest package
48 hours later we are live with the new flow and face our next challenge — attracting visitors to return to our site in order to see the updated flow. With any luck we’ll end up attracting enough new visitors so it won’t matter.
Visit us at CampPak.com!
*This is also human engineering to prevent someone renting different items for different durations — it doesn’t make sense for someone to be going camping for a week and only rent a headlamp for three days and we shouldn’t allow users the freedom to make such a mistake.
