Friday 9 August 2013

Ryanair and Conversion Rate Deconstructing


This year we are not flying Ryanair, even if it was cheaper to fly with them. I left the buying process on their website at one particular place without finishing the process.

Everybody who works in e-commerce deals with the same problem: lots of visitors start your on-line buying process, but a lot of these visits don't end with a completed sale. We spend a lot of time and energy trying to optimize this buying funnel to get more people to finish their sale. It often comes down to a specific step.

The last time I tried to buy our flights on ryanair.com, I knew exactly when I decided not to finish the buying process and buy somewhere else. So I'm writing this post for the guy responsible for Conversion Optimization for the ryanair website: this is the step where it went wrong.


When I wanted to add pieces of luggage to my flight, I saw a combo indicating 2 options. I didn't look too careful (nobody reads on the web, we all just scan), so I thought I had the following 2 options:

1 piece: 50€
2 pieces: 70€ 


This sounded OK: the second piece came with a discount

Of course I wasn't thinking clearly, this is nothing like Ryanair. So I looked again and saw what it realy was:

1 piece of 15 kg: 50€
1 piece of 20 kg: 70€

Say what?


So this combo summed up the whole Ryanair experience: I already saw how I would be checked and re-checked and then be asked by some unpolite and unhelpful groundstaf to pay more, just because I came with 20,9 kg. So no humiliation for us this year: we paid more with another airline and get spared the Ryanair-way.