
Jun 19 2024
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How Could Clarks Improve Their Website?
If news in the press is to be believed, high-street mainstay Clarks are struggling and looking to cut jobs due to losses – Drapers covered this story yesterday.
Knowing the Clarks Originals brand from my time at Aphrodite, I was naturally interested to see what their current online offering was currently serving the public and whether I would suggest any improvements to their website to improve conversion and increase sales. I didn’t look at any paid campaigns etc. I was primarily concerned at how their website could be tweaked to improve their current level of service.
Current Clarks Reputation
Generally speaking I think the public perception of Clarks is somewhere to go to get a quality pair of shoes, especially for your kids school shoes. Clarks will thrive during school holiday periods and then have a slowdown around this until they hit sale windows when they will clear out some stock ahead of the back to school windows.
First Impressions Of Clarks Website
My first impression is that it’s very sale heavy however, you have to remember that it’s June which coincides with standard Summer Sale dates. However coupled with the news that they’re cutting jobs, the wording of “up to 60% off” on the hero banner could make potential buyers think they’re going into liquidation and potentially lose their money.
My suggestion would be to simply change it to “Summer Sale Now On”.

Far Too Many Options On Mega Menu
I’m all for giving customers a choice but do you really need 58 links to different product types within a mega menu?
If this was a list of brands – fair enough – but not for categories. You could surely let the customer filter the categories and make it less messy. There’s too many options
For example, you want a pair of black Brogues. Are these going to be under “Brogues and Lace Ups” or “Black Shoes” or “Wedding & Occasion”?

Poor Filtering Options
Why on earth does any company who offers product reviews, allow a customer to filter by a product rating? Let that sink in for a moment.
Which customer is going to filter by those 3 shoes that have an average 2 star review rating to purchase? It’s going to affect your conversion rate.
People take for granted for example how colour swatches work for ecommerce. It is something that needs great thought and putting into practice carefully to ensure the customer gets the appropriate results.

Inauthentic Basket Counts
A common tactic that I’ve never been a fan of in ecommerce, is to inflate your basket numbers. The reasons being are:
- Customers aren’t stupid and can see straight through it
- You’re making other products look bad
Let’s take the case of this screengrab below:

I added the Tivoli Strap to my bag which is in “67 baskets now!”. Yet when I’ve went back to the category, it’s still in 67 baskets. It looks inauthentic
More importantly, if there are 145 of those 4 styles in peoples baskets, why is the 2x Tivoli Zip styles not in one customers basket? It must be a really unpopular shoe right?
Again, this is going to affect conversion!
Don’t Lean Into Poor Reviews
If your product has obvious issues – or maybe it doesn’t but your customers complain that it does – you can’t allow this to impact your next customer.
Clarks want to be transparent and show product reviews. However the knock-on effect will yet again be low conversion if those products have bad reviews.
What customer is going to see the average 2.2 star rating on the same Tivoli Zip highlighted above, and then go on to purchase? Especially when they then go on to read the detailed reviews that you are presenting them to tell them that not only they are squeaky but they give a customer blisters!


I can almost guarantee that this style of shoe is not retailing online very well.
Poor Search Experience & Unclear Filter Options
I tested the prior example of the “black brogues” which we already know there’s a category for in the mega menu. Again the filtering is letting us down as users.

- I’m not a Clarks regular customer so the width filter options make no sense to me at this stage. Maybe I’m a wide fit so do I need an E width, or a G width – which can also be filtered at a standard width?! – as well as the wide H fit? I really don’t understand and would have to do some more digging around their size guides but at this stage I don’t know what to filter by.
- I’ve searched for black brogues but have options for green.
- At this stage, the system is delivering results not knowing what gender I am searching for. The Gender filter should be higher up in the list and then once I’ve used that, maybe some of the width options will disappear if they aren’t for me. Likewise, some other options may disappear that I don’t need.
Useless Options Showing On PDP
I’ve chosen my shoes, I’m now adding a protector to keep them clean in bad weather. Issues are immediately present that are now going to put me off my purchase:
- Colour available: null
- Select your size: 0
- Select Width: G (standard)
This should be an easy add-on purchase to increase the size of your basket. Yet Clarks are putting obstacles in the way to let that element of doubt creep in. Instead of building up your basket size, you’re now allowing the customer to dwell and doubt their purchase.

Final Analysis
I haven’t put this together in an attempt to belittle the Clarks brand, nor the team that work on it. As an ecommerce consultant, I am fully aware of how hard it is to build and maintain a thriving ecommerce store.
However I am trying to demonstrate that there is opportunities to increase your conversion without reinventing the wheel. I’m sure the company have explored advertising campaigns, partnerships, trying to build out new categories etc to help. These aren’t necessarily needed at this stage whilst problems exist on-site.
First and foremost you need to ensure that your website works well before you spend money driving traffic to it.
Further Steps
My next step would be an in depth GA / business analysis. This would be to look at other ways of driving quality traffic to the site. How is the sites organic performance for key search terms? How is their social performance? A quick glance of over 800k followers on Instagram but a really poor engagement rate and hidden metrics tells its own story. The imagery and wording associated with it needs an overhaul.