Capitalizing on CrossFit’s largest D2C moment of the year

Bundling Open registration with a shirt purchase into a transaction

Overview

Timeline July 2024 - Present
My Role Product Designer and UX Researcher
Team Megan, PM

Background

CrossFit’s largest direct-to-consumer (D2C) opportunity is “The Open,” an annual global competition where participants register for $20 to complete three workouts over three weeks.

In 2024, over 300,000 people registered for the Open.

Despite this success, CrossFit has yet to capitalize fully on this moment by bundling an Open t-shirt with registration to boost revenue, primarily due to technical limitations.

Problem

Currently, purchasing an Open t-shirt and registering for The Open require two separate purchase flows.

This fragmentation increases friction, making it difficult for users to discover and purchase all three items.

Hypothesis

We believe that by integrating the Open registration flow to allow users to bundle relevant items (such as registration and a t-shirt), we can:

  • Significantly reduce friction in purchasing multiple items.

  • Increase conversion rates for both the t-shirt and registration.

Known Challenges

This work has not been done before due to the current registration flow being built on outdated CrossFit web infrastructure, making it risky and resource-intensive to rebuild and/or integrate with third-party checkout partners.

Current purchase flow for open registration

What Success Looks Like

  • Increasing conversion of buying a shirt with registration from 6% to 20%

  • Maintaining 2024 registration participants

Guiding Principles

To keep this work focused and avoid scope-creep, we created “guiding principles” for this project.

  • Make it easy for the customer: The easier it is to assemble a bundle, the higher conversion will be.  

  • Don’t reinvent the wheel: Leverage Shopify to the fullest.

  • Minimize risk: Don’t sign up for unnecessary changes (especially involving our older tech).

  • Test and learn: Where possible, use A/B testing to optimize bundle conversions.

Design Process

Challenges

  • High Risk: This project carried significant risk due to external factors such as shirt fulfillment and shipping costs.

  • Condensed Timeline: We were working under a strict deadline to deliver a proof of concept, which required rapid iteration.

Given the risks and tight timeline, we quickly transitioned into prototyping, user research, and scheduling usability tests to learn and iterate rapidly. 

User Survey Insights

Audience: 2024 Open participants, randomized sample of 14,000 people

  • 22% of buyers expect shipping to be free

  • 86% of US buyers said they would consider purchasing a shirt with the ‘25 registration

  • 29% were interested in also purchasing the Judges Course with registration

Usability Testing

Audience: 6 user tests

  • Common Patterns: Implementing familiar e-commerce patterns helped users navigate the flow with minimal friction.

  • Clear UX Copy: Ensuring the copy was clear and straightforward guided users effectively through the process.

  • Concern for Shipping Costs: Users expressed concerns about shipping costs, indicating the need for us to work with stakeholders at CrossFit to lower costs for users.

Current purchase flow for open registration

Design Improvements

With the above learnings in mind, we made design improvements to the final prototype. These improvements included:

  • Adding a visual to symbolize registration

The Solution

A new purchase flow that maintains the current two-step registration process (to minimize tech risk) and positions the bundling option before the checkout.

This approach minimizes risk while enhancing the user experience.

New Flow