Executive summary
As one of the world’s largest online resale platforms, thredUP is modernizing thrift with technology and making it easy to buy and sell high-quality secondhand apparel, shoes, and accessories.
As part of their initiative to raise the bar for customer experience, thredUP was an early adopter of digital experience analytics software solutions in the hope their product, design, engineering, and customer service could all use such software to build better software.
thredUP soon realized that their legacy software wasn’t delivering on key promises. The product and design teams saw some value in watching sessions, but neither customer service nor engineering found it helpful or productive because thredUP was forced to randomly sample sessions to keep costs down.
They needed more powerful features to understand user journeys and deeper technical insights to enable the proactive development of their main product. David Grumm, VP of Product Engineering, brought in LogRocket because “it’s important to understand what the customer impact or experience really is, and get additional context for where to focus our resolution efforts.”
Now, LogRocket enables thredUP’s company-wide initiative to create exceptional customer experiences and make the best choice when focusing their innovation efforts. It also helps thredUP gain a deep understanding of both good and bad user experiences by providing a single place where its product, design, engineering, and customer service teams can collaborate.
Maximizing the value of every session recording
Product knew there was a mismatch between the value they saw in their legacy analytics software and what engineering and customer support got out of it. With few sessions recorded overall, support often found that the issues customers reported weren’t actually captured for support to view.
This gap in visibility caused trust issues between the support and product teams, as neither team ever felt they got a full sense of the problem when troubleshooting customer issues. This caused a lot of frustration across product, support, and engineering.
“Often, support would go to find a session, and it just wouldn’t be there,” David said. “This is because the cost of recording all sessions is prohibitively expensive, and to manage costs, we went to a simple sampling rate, which left holes in the actual sessions we could see.”
Though looking for issues was “a bit of an expedition,” it was only the beginning of their difficulties with the old tool — even if customer support found the issue they needed. thredUP needed a solution that would provide better insight into user behavior for the product team while increasing the value delivered to customer support.
After finding LogRocket, David and his team dug in deeply to measure LogRocket against their existing digital experience analytics tool and quickly discovered that LogRocket’s Conditional Recording offered the best of both worlds: better value by only recording relevant sessions and all the technical information they needed to solve issues faster.
With Conditional Recording, thredUP was able to set specific criteria for how to record sessions more effectively, by focusing on the areas they knew were important to track, such as checkout flows.
“We have a lot more control over which sessions we’re actually capturing, if not all of them.”
Now, when customers report issues, support can easily find their session and redirect customers quickly, boosting customer satisfaction and building on their customers’ trust in thredUP. As a result, fewer issues are being escalated to the product and engineering teams, reducing workloads and building trust across the board.
Creating a connection between backend and frontend
thredUP’s engineering team lacked a strong connection between their frontend and backend monitoring software. “Sifting through logs and then trying to tie it to specific interactions on the UI takes a lot of experience to navigate,” David said. To bridge the gap, senior developers had to assist junior developers with making connections between platforms, delaying time-to-resolution and reducing insight into their site performance.
With LogRocket, thredUP was able to leverage their Datadog integration, which ended their days of manually pairing events across the client and server sides.
Now, as David asserts, anyone on their team can dive into LogRocket and start troubleshooting because “LogRocket provides a familiar environment for engineers to use readily.” Engineering no longer has to spend time sorting through logs and matching circumstances to recreate user issues and can focus their efforts elsewhere.
“LogRocket saves so much time.”
With a comfortable debugging environment that provided a good developer experience, LogRocket has saved thredUP a lot of time. Anyone on the team can see where errors actually manifest and tie them back to server-side events. Removing the need to sift through and correlate issues manually has freed up a lot of developer time — which thredUP has deployed toward innovating on their exceptional user experience.
Making better products with cross-team visibility
thredUP also realized LogRocket could take them a layer deeper than their previous solution by providing insight into the differences between expected and actual user behavior.
“LogRocket provides the product team with a personalized view. They are able to go in and see real experiences through session playback,” says David.
Using LogRocket’s heatmap, funnel, and path analysis data, product is better able to track metrics around engagement, bounce rate, and “survival rate” — an internal metric used to measure how long users spend on the site as they move through the thredUP funnel.
“It’s nice to be able to go into LogRocket and see where issues are occurring and know how to fix them for all users.”
This ability came in clutch when the team was looking for ways around a legacy issue. “We used to force people to sign up before they could see the inventory, and a lot of people bounced prior to signing up,” said David. This tanked their conversion rate, an issue that needed a solid fix, fast.
Using Conditional Recording, thredUP intelligently captured all of the sessions related to a sign-up gate they were A/B testing. The product team then confirmed that the sign-in gate was the cause of their poor user experience. “We had two sets of experiences running and could see where users were dropping out of the funnel,” David explained. “We were able to verify and support different hypotheses by reviewing sessions and the data we got from LogRocket dashboards.”
After removing the sign-up gate, the product team ran another A/B test to trial two new funnel flows and used LogRocket to determine which funnel was most effective.
With LogRocket, the product team is now focused on improving user experience, rather than spending time resolving problems — helping build their team’s confidence and shifting their focus back onto the goal of creating exceptional customer experiences.
Significantly improving key web performance indicators
thredUP was impressed by how immediately LogRocket revolutionized the way all three stakeholder teams worked together to resolve issues, but the real win came when they saw how much their site had improved against key performance indicators.
As part of their company goals for the year, thredUP had determined they needed to make improvements to the performance of their site — the faster and smoother the site performance, the more customer conversions they could count on.
Using LogRocket data to measure against core web vitals measured by the CrUX report, the engineering team has seen significant month-over-month performance improvements since using LogRocket.
“Our largest contentful paint (LCP) is up 64% since October 2022,” says David. Good scores on cumulative layout shift (CLS) have also increased by 13% over the same period. These improvements pointed to a significant jump in user experience quality that thredUP credits to switching to LogRocket.
Planning for the future
Though thredUP has already seen great success with LogRocket on their primary web product, they plan to expand LogRocket to their mobile app to investigate crash states and their causes. The team also sees potential for using LogRocket on their white-label vendor sites, improving their B2B customer experience.
The general quality-of-life improvements thredUP has experienced since adopting LogRocket have not only improved their day-to-day operations, but have also presented new areas of improvement. As adoption expands across the company, with David noting that “people want to get access to LogRocket and learn how to use it” to boost their own performance, more and more teams at thredUP are shifting their work to focus on raising the bar for their customer experience, working in tandem to achieve company goals.
