Win Report: How simplifying a modal increased transactions by 13%

Published: August 2025

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

If you’ve read our previous Win Report, you’ll have seen how decluttering a product page increased transactions by 17% for one client. In this Win Report, we’ll show you how simplifying the website’s confirmation modal—the next stage of the funnel—increased transactions by a further 13%.

Side-by-side comparison of an original cluttered confirmation modal with upsells, email capture, and icons, versus a simplified variation focusing on the product and checkout options.

The client supplies sustainably harvested countertops for high-end kitchens.

Research: You can be your own tester

One of the fastest ways to spot a CRO opportunity is what we call method marketing. As we said in a previous Win Report:

Method marketing draws inspiration from actors who immerse themselves deeply in their roles. At CRE, going “method” means becoming real customers of our clients, using their website, making purchases, and bringing their products or services into our lives. This delivers tacit knowledge—the kind of understanding that can only be acquired through personal experience—like being a parent or having a hangover.

In this case, our consultant experienced a classic “method moment” when they added a worktop to their order and became… confused.

Here’s the modal that popped up when our CRO Consultant added products to their cart.

The Control: A confirmation modal.

We’ve all seen confirmation modals that appear when we’ve added something to our basket. Typically, they offer two routes forward: checkout now or continue shopping.

But this modal was not so clear. In addition to the confirmation (top-left), it also offered two upsells (each with prices and buttons), and three secondary value propositions (each with icons and text). The route to checkout, which included an email capture device, also seemed needlessly confusing.

Close-up of a checkout prompt asking users to enter their email for speedy checkout, with options to proceed or skip. — Is it speedier if we enter our email address for ‘speedy checkout’, or skip this step and proceed to checkout?

Is this kind of complexity a showstopper? Certainly not for everyone, but analytics identified the modal as a big leak, with a significant proportion of users abandoning the funnel at this point.

Consequently, we hypothesized that simplifying this confirmation modal would increase the number of users beginning the checkout process, and thus lead to more conversions. As we’ve shown before, even small reductions in cognitive load can dramatically improve conversion rates, not to mention the lives of CRE consultants.

The Variation: A simplified and refocused process.

To simplify the modal, we:

Increased the size of the product image.
Decluttered the remaining product details.
Removed the upsells, email capture form, and value propositions.
Added the value of the basket with an estimated delivery cost.
Simplified to two clear calls to action: Continue Shopping & View Cart & Checkout.

Result: 13% more transactions

The simplified modal increased the number of visitors who progressed to the checkout page by 21%, and increased overall transactions by 13%.

Both figures demonstrate the value of removing friction from your sales funnel, especially if a site has become cluttered with “persuasive” elements. Of course, simplifications should be tested in the same way as additions. By running experiments we are testing our intuitions against reality, and learning what actually works for our unique audience and offer.

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of the client’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

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Win Report: Why adding one button increased sales by 30%

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