How Amplitude Used Session Replay to Improve Our Self-Serve Checkout Experience

In October 2023, we announced Amplitude’s Plus plan, which brings together the best of Amplitude’s Digital Analytics Platform in a single, low-cost plan. Modifying our company’s pricing strategy meant updating the digital experience for our free Starter plan and the new Plus plan—including implementing a self-serve checkout flow that enables customers to independently purchase our product without contacting our sales team.

We used Amplitude Session Replay to inform the product development process and ensure a frictionless customer experience.

Unlock qualitative insights with Session Replay

Amplitude Session Replay enables product, design, and growth marketing teams to gain qualitative insights from their digital product experiences. We used Session Replay to visualize a reconstruction of individual user experiences with the new checkout flow and observe the walkthrough-style video showing what actions users took.

Session Replay was critical to our product development process because it enabled us to pair quantitative insights with qualitative data and understand the product experience from the perspective of the customers using it.

Implementing Session Replay in our product

Leveraging Session Replay guidelines, our cross-functional team of product, design, research, and engineering aligned on milestone events to implement and track in the new checkout experience. We decided to target customers’ first impressions to determine if the new flow introduced any friction points.

These four milestone events represent a funnel in Amplitude, starting when a user sees the upsell experience, opens the pricing modal, views the pricing page, and starts the self-serve checkout flow.

The milestone events we tracked were:

• When a customer reaches the upsell pricing modal
• When a customer reaches the Amplitude pricing page
• When the self-serve checkout flow is started
• When the self-serve checkout flow is completed

The in-product pricing modal for users on the Starter plan

After implementing milestone events to track, we curated a cohort of customers for an A/B split test using Amplitude Experiment. We exposed this cohort to the latest product changes with the checkout flow, enabling the, to independently upgrade from the Starter plan to the Plus plan.

Once we launched our experiment in production, we tracked our cohort of customers as they moved through the designated flow. As customers met milestone events (e.g., moved from the upsell modal to the pricing page), individual sessions were automatically logged and stored for our team to review.

Diagnosing issues faster

Similar to an in-person usability session, Session Replay enabled our teams to observe customers moving through each page, view, and click. We quickly identified when customers deviated from the intended flow or became distracted by something else during the experience. Combining the quantitative data from the funnel analysis with the qualitative data from Session Replay empowered our team to solve potential issues with the user interface, interaction design, and overall flow.

A replay of the checkout page that our team iterated on

For instance, our team found page elements that had a negative correlation with conversion. They devised a new user experience flow and deployed that as an A/B test. Furthermore, Amplitude Experiment allowed the team to roll out the test on a specific cohort of users that were on the starter plan and had not seen the upgrade page previously.

By combining quantitative and qualitative data, Amplitude’s platform (web analytics, session replay, and native experimentation) enabled our team to be agile and iterate faster than if we had to integrate separate analytics and experimentation tools, and then further reconcile that data with voice of customer data in a third tool.

Each time we diagnosed additional issues, our team quickly pivoted to understand the necessary experience changes before rolling out the experience to the rest of our customer base.

In addition to Session Replay, we referenced our progress with Amplitude Analytics. Our self-serve checkout flow was set up as a funnel using funnel analysis to understand conversions, visualize the user journey, and identify drop-offs—users reaching one of the milestones but not progressing to the next. We could filter out and view session reconstructions of specific users that met behavioral cohort parameters and gather more context on whether the cause was due to site performance, design friction, user confusion, or something else.

Examples of users with session replays. Our team can filter and select replays from this list to watch, learn, iterate, and serve better digital customer experiences.

Get started with Session Replay today

Session Replay empowered our product, design, and growth marketing teams to learn and pivot quickly, be confident in our product decisions, and elevate the customer experience. By combining qualitative insights with quantitative data, we could explore the “why” behind the “what,” making informed product decisions that saved us time and resources.