Who doesn’t love a bargain? Branded product offers are universally popular and practically guarantee sales at a faster rate than usual.
During discovery, I saw our client needlessly divide short term deals into multiple categories like Clearance, Sale and Offers.
Worse still, categorisation, tagging and filter issues meant offers did not always include all eligible items. Many were often inadvertently excluded.
The following example illustrates the issue and corrective steps I took.
Situation – September 2024 brand offers were raking in lower than expected numbers
I was intrigued by the disparity between men’s sales and women’s and decided to investigate.
Task – Navigate live offers to replicate user experience
This September 2024 offer promised 2 branded items for £50
Men’s and women’s items were separated by a filter called ‘Genders’, not ‘Category’.
Only 2 men’s items? I investigated and began finding problems.
One of the 2 items appeared ineligible because it was missing the offer icon.
I tested and confirmed ineligibility by adding it to the basket.
The price did not reflect the £50 pricing.
An ineligible item made me consider what other else might have been missed so I opened a new tab alongside the Offer page and navigated to the Seasalt brand.
I expected to find 1 item displaying the offer icon (consistent with the offer page).
Instead, I found 8 eligible items missing from the offer!
Shockingly, 8 out of 9 eligible men’s items were omitted from the offer.
Worse still, an ineligible item was included.
Clearly, this menswear offer was unlikely to succeed and ran a strong risk of frustrating customers and generating complaints.
Action: Investigate and add omitted products, and then implement a process to avoid repeating it
Our client is a highly siloed operation. I contacted 3 individual product managers and each referred me to the next.
My request was four-fold:
- Check if the ineligible item needed to be included or removed
- Add 8 additional items to the Men’s offer
- Let me investigate within the content management system (CMS) to identify what went wrong and create a checklist or corrective process to avoid repeat omissions and ineligible inclusions
- Extend offer duration if possible
Here’s what I discovered that may have led to poor sales for this offer. (I checked other offers and found similar issues):
Categorisation issues (tags and filters)
The client struggles with clearly defined tags and filters. There is no established default set of filters applied across clothing ranges, which creates significant problems when searching large product ranges.
The selected offer used 5 filters:
The Seasalt Men’s brand page also used 5 filters but replaced ‘Genders’ with ‘Categories’.
I recommended replacing Genders with Categories and knew it would resolve the issue of missing items.
Why? Because I had already mapped and documented every filter used across men’s and women’s clothing, and this offer was the only time Genders was used.
Categories is a term customers understand and can easily use to filter menswear from womenswear.
Result: Recommendation ignored for other changes that backfired
In October 2024, weeks after I proposed an easy solution to test, our client opted to introduce an expanded range of filters. They removed Genders but did not include Categories. This did not add missing items. It made things worse by making it impossible to separate mens and womens clothes.
I reiterated my proposal in detail with included tables of all the filters used in the clothing department, arguing for a consistent list of filters for men, and a more expansive list for women but did not receive a reply before my engagement ended with the hire of an in-house content designer.
Update: July 2025 – Offer has gotten worse
The Seasalt offer is back, but that’s where the good news ends for menswear.
Advertised as 2 for £50, it is in fact 2 for £45.
The offer includes 21 items. There is 1 men’s item. You won’t know how many without scrolling through – there’s still no Category filter to separate menswear from womenswear.
The client reduced the filters to 5 but still omitted a vital one. Style and Sleeve length replaced Price and Category.
I then navigated to the Seasalt mens page and manually counted 44 eligible items missing.
Only 1 out of 45 items are included in the offer.
£5 differentials can be easily corrected and the option to add Categories can still be implemented to test a viable solution.
Sherief Razzaque, uxwriter.work 