During the panel discussion “Conversion Emergency Room,” conversion expert and Conversionista founder John Ekman clashed with PriceRunner and Trustvoice founder Kristofer Arwin, as well as Marcus Sjölin, CEO of Linné Elektronik, who has increased his conversion rate from one to eight percent in just one year. Led by moderator Nicklas Hermansson, the panel dissected the most common and costly UX mistakes in Swedish e-commerce right now.
To provide a concrete picture of the situation in the industry, John Ekman reviewed the 100 largest Swedish e-commerce companies before the discussion, based on data from Ehandel.se. He investigated how the sites performed on three well-known and basic criteria for conversion optimization.
The first criterion concerns whether the site helps the customer choose a size or color on the product page if the customer forgets, instead of simply displaying a punishing error message stating that a selection must be made. The second is to have an open and directly visible search field instead of hiding the search behind an icon for a magnifying glass, something that 40 percent of the 100 largest sites still fail to do on both mobile and desktop. The third criterion is to hide the field for discount codes in the checkout behind a discreet text link.
If you show an open discount code field, people think like this: Oh, I need a discount code, I'm going to go to some kind of discount code site or something,” explains John Ekman.
When the results of the review were summarized at the end of the discussion, the verdict against the Swedish e-commerce giants was harsh.
I did this survey of the 100 largest e-commerce companies in Sweden and I concluded that not a single one meets three basic conversion criteria or best practices,” says John Ekman.
Only Turns on the Function Without Strategy
Another crucial piece of the puzzle for lowering the barriers to purchase is customer reviews and social proof. Kristofer Arwin refers to the fact that reviews, on average, boost conversion between 5 and 40 percent, and highlights PostNord's recent E-barometer for the second quarter, where over half of consumers state that reviews are the most important decision-making factor before a purchase.
Despite the fact that almost all e-commerce companies know how important this is, Kristofer Arwin believes that most make a costly mistake in how they manage their reviews.
The most common mistake I see is still that you see reviews as a function that you just turn on on your site or your e-commerce platform. And then I've done it and I have reviews, everything is great. And then you haven't really understood that this is business-critical, that it can create very large values,” says Kristofer Arwin.
According to him, many e-commerce companies lack insight into how their ratings stack up against the competition. They blindly look at their own numbers without doing a proper benchmarking against the market.
You have 4.3 on a product and 66 reviews. Is this good or bad for your conversion? It’s a completely relative question. You need to understand what your competitive situation looks like. And if you have 4.3 and the competitors have 4.8, then the question is: will you be able to compete in that world, or do we need to do something?” says Kristofer Arwin, who highlights Clas Ohlson as an example after the chain has worked systematically and long-term with its customer reviews for several years.
From 1 to 8 Percent by Daring to Clean Up
For Marcus Sjölin and Gothenburg-based Linné Elektronik, the past year has meant a dramatic journey where the conversion rate has skyrocketed from one to eight percent. According to him, the success is partly due to daring to niche its range with unique products that are not available everywhere, but above all about building a culture where you dare to make mistakes in the interface.
When you start working with conversion, then you have to dare to fail and dare to go out and try a journey that absolutely doesn't work,” says Marcus Sjölin.
He also warns against evaluating new features during extreme sales periods such as Black Friday, when customers shop regardless of how the site looks. The real test takes place on a completely ordinary weekday in the middle of the month – and then it is also important to dare to decommission features that weigh down the purchasing experience.
Dare to throw things out there, see if it converts, remove it if it doesn't work, remove it anyway to see if it actually makes a difference,” says Marcus Sjölin.
John Ekman agrees that the fear of experimenting holds back many companies. He cites the CEO of Flygresor.se, Mattias Nyman, as an example. When Nyman experimented in Google Ads and accidentally caused a mistake that cost the company 300,000 kronor on one morning, the owners' reaction was not a scolding – but praise for daring to test the limits. For many companies, however, everything comes to a standstill out of fear of losing what they already have.
The Site Becomes a Glorified Checkout
When the panel looks twelve months ahead, artificial intelligence dominates the agenda. Marcus Sjölin emphasizes that today's consumers expect service around the clock. If a customer is sitting at four in the morning on a Sunday and wondering which accessory fits a specific electronic product, an AI solution must be able to provide the answer directly on the site so that the purchase decision can be made there and then, while distributors and freight companies must be pressured to deliver seven days a week.
Kristofer Arwin and John Ekman point out an even greater shift: that the actual product search, so-called Product Discovery, is rapidly moving out of e-commerce companies' own sites and into AI services. For an AI agent to even recommend an e-commerce company, reviews and trust signals must be structured and accessible to the AI models.
What will be the absolute most crucial input for AI when it comes to recommending yes, buy that there and you should buy it from there? Yes, it's the customer's voice,” says Kristofer Arwin.
When the customer has received their recommendation in an AI interface and clicks through to the online store, the role of the e-commerce site changes fundamentally. Then the customer is no longer there to search or be inspired.
If Product Discovery moves almost entirely to AI, what will your site be then, what's left there? It becomes like a glorified checkout and your only job becomes to remove the friction when customers come there so that they can actually reach completion,” says John Ekman.
He mentions, among other things, exact delivery promises as a critical area for cutting friction in the checkout, where vague indications of two to four working days must be replaced with precise information about which day of the week the package will actually arrive, just as Amazon works.
To survive this shift, quick interventions on a conversion emergency room are not enough, according to John Ekman. Instead, a hard, daily effort is required in everyday life.
You shouldn't come to the emergency room, you should get a 24-month conversion rehab program. That's what we need to work on long-term with these things. You eat your own dog food, you check your own Google Analytics, you do usability tests, you read your own newsletters, you go through your own checkout, you work with this every day,” concludes John Ekman.