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A mobile cart rebuilt around how customers actually shop, validated against the original at scale.
The brand
SMITH builds optics and protection for the people who live outside, from goggles and helmets on snow to sunglasses on every other surface in between. Their direct-to-consumer business serves two very different audiences in the same funnel: full-price retail customers and pro-deal subscribers who get access to discounted product.
The mobile cart was a quiet bottleneck for both. SMITH partnered with Surefoot to figure out where mobile shoppers were getting stuck and to design a cart experience that could lift conversion without compromising either audience.
The impact
On mobile, every extra tap and every unclear button is friction. We didn't redesign Smith's cart for looks. We redesigned it to make the next step impossible to miss.
The challenge
The existing cart was busy, the calls-to-action were unclear, and tap targets were small. Mobile visitors were dropping off at the moment they should have been advancing.
SMITH serves full-price retail buyers and pro-deal subscribers in the same checkout. Any redesign had to lift the experience for both, without optimizing one segment at the cost of the other.
Beyond usability friction, the existing mobile cart had CSS rendering issues across common devices. Visitors weren't just confused; many couldn't reliably use the cart at all.
The approach
We combined Google Analytics funnel data, Hotjar session recordings and heatmaps, and live user testing to pinpoint where mobile shoppers hesitated in the cart and what they were trying to do next.
The research pointed to a single, falsifiable bet: a cleaner, mobile-first cart with bigger tap targets and clearer next steps would reduce drop-off and push more visitors into checkout. SMITH and Surefoot agreed it was worth a controlled A/B test.
We designed a fully reworked mobile cart and developed it directly against SMITH's site so the variant ran in real conditions, not in a prototype. Larger CTAs, simpler layout, fewer competing elements, login surfaced at the top, edit-cart with mobile-friendly tap targets, and a single primary CTA at the bottom.
After the test reached significance, we cut the data by full-price and pro-deal segments to make sure the variant lifted both. It did, with the largest revenue gain coming from full-price buyers, where the margin lives.
What we learned
Bigger tap targets, fewer competing elements, and a single obvious next step are not aesthetic choices. They are the difference between a customer continuing and a customer leaving.
Funnel analytics tell you where. Session replay and heatmaps tell you how. User testing tells you why. Combining all three produced a hypothesis sharp enough to commit a build to.
A statistically significant overall lift can still hide a losing segment. Cutting the data by audience after the test confirmed the variant earned its place across the funnel.
The results
The redesigned mobile cart drove a statistically significant lift in visits to checkout, with the gain concentrated where it mattered most: returning mobile visitors moved into checkout at a meaningfully higher rate. Transactions trended up alongside, and revenue per visitor climbed, with projected full-price revenue alone landing in the hundreds of thousands annually. Segment analysis confirmed the variant lifted both pro-deal subscribers and full-price retail shoppers, with the largest revenue gain coming from full-price buyers. Post-test session review backed up the numbers: control visitors scrolled and hesitated, while variant visitors moved cleanly to checkout.
The takeaway
The cart that lets a buyer finish without thinking is the cart that wins.
Frequently asked
Mobile users were hesitating exactly where they should have been advancing. Funnel data flagged the cart as the steepest drop-off, and session recordings showed friction unique to mobile (small tap targets, an unclear next step, login buried below a long scroll) that desktop visitors didn't face. A mobile-specific test let us address that friction directly without disturbing desktop conversion.
We segmented the results after the test reached significance. Both pro-deal subscribers and full-price retail shoppers saw lift, with the largest revenue gain coming from the full-price segment. That cut matters because optimizations that win on average can still mask a losing segment.
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