How Continuous Optimization Enables Hepsiburada to Innovate with Little Risk

In 2015, the company decided to shift their business model from being an online retailer to becoming a marketplace platform, a bold move to help them stay ahead of competitors in the market. This move required a complete redesign of their website to support the new systems needed for the open marketplace model.

Testing a Complete Website Overhaul

Hepsiburada decided to test two versions of their entire website (the old site and the newly redesigned site) against each other as part of the redesign process. They wanted to be absolutely certain that the new site was performing better than the old site before launch.

Using Optimizely, they started small, testing 100 visitors per day to start to get some qualitative feedback from customers. Over time, they slowly ramped up the traffic to reach significance for each department on the website. When the first results came in, they discovered the new site was actually under performing. Gökhan Besen, Head of Products & UX at Hepsiburada, explains that “if we had launched the new site without testing, it would have caused crisis in the company because revenue dropped with the new site.”   

Launching the New Site with 100% Confidence

In the end, they were able to test over 6 million visitors to the site with Optimizely. This combined with feedback from user testing gave them a good understanding of where customers were having most issues, and allowed them to make the necessary improvements on the new site, leading to a 22% increase in conversion rate on the new site and doubled revenue over a two year period. Ultimately, Hepsiburada launched their new website with 100% confidence.

“Everything you want is on the other side of testing in the digital world”

Gökhan Besen

Head of Product & UX, Hepsiburada