The Challenge

Ernest Jones is a leading jewellery retailer. While their extensive product range is a strength, it also became a source of friction. Especially for their mobile-first audience, where limited visibility meant shoppers had to navigate a wide range of products with reduced screen space. Despite sitewide optimisation, this created frustration, particularly for visitors in the earlier stages of their purchase journey.

Without a way to identify these visitors, never mind support them, Ernest Jones was losing potential customers before they even got close to purchasing. And they’re not alone. For retailers with many products or high-consideration categories, this early-stage friction can quietly drain performance, particularly on mobile.

Without intent, there was no way to detect when visitors were struggling to narrow their options or needed support. This behaviour was costing the business at a critical early point in the journey, and the team wanted to change it.

The Hypothesis

By supporting visitors at this stage by highlighting discovery tools, filters in particular, we can reduce the amount of friction and visitors who drop off.

The H Samuel team believed in surfacing the right tools at the right time. The goal wasn’t to redesign their filters, but to surface them for visitors who needed help refining their selection.

According to The Intent Gap, 46% of online shoppers feel overwhelmed by the amount of information or options on retail websites. This reinforces the need to surface helpful tools at key friction points. And this is precisely what Ernest Jones planned to do.

The Solution

Using Made With Intent’s AI agent, Ernest Jones focused on the Build Struggle segments from our framework. These visitors are defined as those who are early in their journey but showing signs of friction, such as excessive scrolling, repeated filter use, or bouncing between category pages. These behaviours suggest they’re engaged, but are finding it hard to narrow down their options.

The Ernest Jones team deployed a gentle on-page nudge highlighting the product filters on the PLP to support these visitors. This subtle prompt was designed to help them take the next step without disrupting their experience. It was also only shown to visitors in the segment to avoid distracting or overwhelming those who didn't need it. 

The entire approach ran within their existing Bloomreach setup, enabling real-time responsiveness without disrupting broader experience flows.

The Impact

Without Intent, visitors who struggled during product discovery were left unsupported, increasing drop-offs even in those with purchase intent.

With Intent, Ernest Jones identified these moments of friction and intervened with a timely nudge to reduce struggle and keep visitors moving.

Key Results: 15% increase in conversion rate

This Play shows that supporting product discovery doesn’t always mean changing what you offer. Sometimes, it’s just about pointing to the right thing at the right time. With real-time behavioural insight, Ernest Jones reduced abandonment during a historically leaky part of the journey.

With intent embedded as part of their ecommerce strategy, this success paved the way for a new Save For Later experience, designed to capture value even earlier in the funnel.

Product discovery shouldn’t be overwhelming. By identifying struggle signals as they happen, retailers can actively support purchase journeys in the early stages in helpful, impactful ways.

Want to support shoppers earlier in the journey? Explore more about Discovery with Intent.