Client Overview

SOTO Gardens is a UK-based Shopify brand that sells professionally designed garden collections and tools, curated to suit a range of outdoor and indoor conditions.

Their flagship ready-made plant borders are paired and curated by an RHS medal-winning garden designer, delivered directly to customers’ doorsteps. The brand saves customers from the hard work of designing and guessing what will work best for their garden landscape, so that gardening novices get boast-worthy landscapes without any gardening trial and error.

The Insight

It sounds almost too simple, but a single word in your navigation can move traffic and conversions more than most redesigns do. 

SOTO’s flagship pre-designed plant collections were categorized under the header “Collections” in the main website’s navigation menu. This term is commonly used on countless Shopify stores as the default name to categorize the store’s products.

The problem here is that the brand retained the e-commerce language term and did not consider a term that best describes what customers specifically came there for. Behavior data showed visitors hesitating to browse "Collections," when what they were looking for was a term that led straight to the product they wanted, like "Garden Borders".

Founders and teams see the big picture. Website redesigns, page speed optimization, and other visible aspects definitely make a difference. But sometimes, the highest ROI improvement can quietly remain untapped in the words that customers see before they land on your sales page. 

The Test

We only roll changes out site-wide after testing them in a controlled A/B test. Here's how this one was run. 

• The change: Changing a word in the navigation bar of SOTO Gardens from “Collections” to “Garden Borders”.
• Tool used: Intelligems
• Test Window: May 19, 2026, to June 16, 2026
• Traffic Split: The test ran on an even 50/50 split between control and variant. 
• Total sample: over 55,000 visitors across both groups 
• Probability of beating control: 90% (conversion rate and revenue per visitor)

Test conditions

1. No new campaigns ran in parallel during the test.
2. No discounts or pricing were changed.
3. No other page or sales funnel elements changed during this period.

The Results

The variant outperformed the control on conversion rate, revenue per visitor, and average order value, with a 90% probability of beating the control on conversion rate and revenue per visitor. 

Scaled to a full month of traffic, this change is worth an estimated £20,404 in additional revenue. With this test conclusion, SOTO Gardens has now rolled out “Garden Borders” to its entire traffic.

Why It Worked

Clarity beats cleverness every single time.

There were no new campaigns, no discounting, and no redesign. All we did was rename a collection to align with how customers actually think and search.

This is the part of CRO that gets overlooked. 

Founders chase big redesigns when sometimes the highest-ROI move is fixing the words customers see first. Moreover, small single-variable tests like this one are also the fastest to run and the easiest to trust, because there's no ambiguity about what caused the improvement in sales.

Key Takeaways

• Audit your navigation for internal jargon. If your team's language for a product differs from how customers search for or talk about it, that mismatch is costing you conversions before a visitor even reaches a product page.
• Small, single-variable A/B tests are often the fastest path to a confident result, because there's only one variable to explain the outcome. 
• Test before you roll out store-wide. A traffic sample tells you whether a change actually works before you commit it to every visitor.

Ready to Find Your Own Quick Win?

If your website navigation still uses the default internal jargon instead of customer-centric terms, then you're probably leaving revenue on the table too. A single-word test like this one is quick to set up, and a few weeks of traffic is enough to show whether it improves your sales.