Carvana optimizes critical features using FullStory, without sacrificing site performance

Carvana, the leading e-commerce platform for buying and selling used cars, offers consumers an intuitive and hassle-free digital car buying experience, where visitors can find and compare vehicles, apply for financing, and arrange delivery or pickup–all online. Carvana uses FullStory’s digital experience intelligence platform to iterate on critical site features and better understand the overall digital user experience.

Carvana improves key site features with FullStory analytics

Maintained site performance while accessing FullStory data

The Carvana product team focuses heavily on its Core Web Vitals, considering site performance as an experience feature in itself. Concerned about potential performance impact, the Carvana team created their own A/B test to ensure that capturing extensive data from FullStory wasn’t hindering functionality. The conclusion: despite its powerful capabilities, FullStory did not diminish site performance—and opened opportunities for more iterative changes.

Updated site search functionality to increase car reservations

Carvana’s product team wanted to make the site’s search bar more functional and user-friendly. To do this, the team worked through half a dozen iterations and watched user sessions in FullStory to analyze engagement and evaluate each version. Ultimately, the changes the team made resulted in a roughly 5% increase in cars reserved by customers for checkout.

Discovered under-use of a key feature with Heat Maps

To make online car shopping more lifelike, Carvana installed a “spinner” feature, which allows shoppers to see a 360º view of a vehicle. After looking at heat map analyses in FullStory, though, they were surprised to find that most visitors also sought out the traditional photo gallery. Carvana used this knowledge to rethink the presentation of vehicle detail pages, making the photo galleries more prominent to drive shopper engagement.