Scrubz Body’s e-commerce site wasn’t pulling its weight.

The skin-care products retailer has sold online for 12 years, and sales have never taken off, especially compared with its one storefront in New York, owner Roberta Perry says.

This became especially clear during the 2017 holiday season, she says. Online sales increased about 12%-17% year over year in Q4. By comparison, store sales increased about 27% year over year, Perry says. Overall, the holidays account for 35%-40% of Scrubz Body’s total annual sales, she says.

“While our store sales totally rocked and increased during the holidays, our online sales were lukewarm at best and only slightly higher than the year before,” Perry says.

“E-commerce more than pays for itself, but it wasn’t delivering what I wanted it to,” she adds.

Perry decided it was time to figure out why. She launched ScrubzBody.com on a very basic website builder with an e-commerce plugin in 2006. In 2011, Perry switched to using a Shopify e-commerce platform, and then in 2015, she switched to Woo Commerce. With each switch and roll out of new features, sales would increase a little, roughly 5%-10%, but never the major bump she was hoping for.

A woman in Perry’s business group runs a user experience design agency called Ptype and recommended she use a tool called Hot Jar, which heat maps how consumers navigate her website. Perry knew that Scrubz Body’s functionally was lacking, as it would often take her three or four clicks to find a certain page, and she knew exactly what she was looking for.

“It was like a light bulb gone off,” Perry says. “[The site] could be pretty as it is, but if it’s clunky and people can’t find what they are looking for comfortably, it’s not likely they’ll buy anything.”

Scrubz Body surveyed about 30 consumers about the site’s usability with 40 different questions, such as, “Could you find what you were looking for?” and received “tremendous” feedback on how the site could be improved. Perry hired Ptype to redesign and remap her site. She also got new photos taken of her SKUs.

The process took three months that she rolled out in phases, and she finished the project at the beginning of June. So far the results are already impressive, she says.

Sales are up more than 22% in the week after the launch compared with the year-ago period. Her average time on site has increased to four to six minutes compared with two or three, and the retailer’s bounce rate also plummeted to 2% from around 50% previously, she says. Overall, the site is cleaner and it takes “so many less clicks” to find products, she says.

One of the biggest changes that she made was her top navigation menus. Instead of having drop-down menus that had more drop-down menus hidden in them, now each drop-down menu is larger and all in one box. Scrubz also incorporated feedback from the consumer survey. For example, one respondent asked if the retailer sold men’s products. It does, but it is under “specialty scrubs.” Now, the retailer made “For Men” one of the categories in the drop-down menu so shoppers can easily find it.

On the category landing page, underneath each product, the retailer added the product’s ingredients or scents so shoppers don’t have to click each product detail page to see this commonly sought information.

On the homepage, the retailer can now put an information box over the hero image, and she can easily change the copy of what the box says instead of creating her own art with words over an image, Perry says.

Ptype had to code these features into the platform’s backend architecture. Perry decided to go this route instead of replatforming because she didn’t find any vendor with a template that she could customize for everything she wanted.

“When I thought about changing themes on Shopify and Woo Commerce, everything has a little something that I wanted, but if you want it specific, it has to be written in code,” she says.

For the 2018 holiday season, Perry is hoping sales will double over last year, she says. The redesign will play a large part into that, as will more exposure on an episode of the Bravo TV “Sell It Like Serhant” show that she recently was featured on.

She also is coming out with more products that are gift oriented, such as a wreath made out of 2-ounce sample bottles, or Party in a Box, which is a house-party kit.