iPelican – professional restaurant equipment marketplace

iPelican – is kind of a Google Merchant Center for professional restaurant equipment. It has two types of users B2B: partners who sell equipment and customers who buy it. Headquarters are located in Russia.

Once upon a time, iPelican's CEO decided to change the monetization model for partners, redesign the website to make it easier for customers to find products, raise conversion and earn more money. It was an ambitious project and he came to me with this task.

The product page is the most important thing on the website. It is a landing page for customers who are browsing for equipment. Also here a customer should click a link and go to the partner's website. Partners are paying for this clicks so product's page conversion is crucial for business.

We worked hard on this page, made series of experiments and raised conversion rate from 3.6% up to 9.2%.

iPelican has a huge equipment catalog. It consists of thousands of products, hundreds of categories, types and brands. It was tricky to organize all this stuff. Thing was that customers were used to look for equipment in the catalogue and also it was good for SEO. So I should pay close attention to it.

I took five most popular subcategories in every category and hided other items under "All subcategories" link. Also I put icons – mini photos of the most recognizable product of the category near its caption.

When a new partner signs up, he gets access to his account through the admin panel. A partner uses this interface to upload product XML-feed, manage customer reviews, get clicks analytics and control balance.

It's important for a partner to get aware of any issues or changes in his account so we put five information blocks with main account stats to the main admin panel page.

If there is an issue, for example, XML-file error or the balance is not enough – partner see a red alert in the block and a call to action button to improve the issue immediately.

Error 404 – my favorite page :)

Pelican is a website's symbol, but there is no place for it on the strict business main page or product pages. Error 404 – is an ideal place for such a cute thing, so I used it without hesitation.

Before redesign project iPelican didn't have a mobile version. It was something like responsive and actually very hard to work with. That caused huge mobile users bounced rate and low conversion rate.

Discussing mobile version we decided to make it separated and as simple as possible. So we cut everything except catalog, search and product pages from it.

Mobile version turned out to be light, neat and usable. Bounce rate went down, conversion rate increased.

As a result I'm quite proud of the iPelican project. We definitely made it better. After series of hypothesis and experiments, we managed to increase conversion by 2.5 times, simplify admin panel for partners, reduce bounce rate and improved mobile user experience.