How I Increased Nykaa’s Mega Sales Revenue by 10% Using a Simple CRO Hack and Data

Company Background

Nykaa is India’s leading e-retailer for beauty and cosmetics—comparable to Sephora in the U.S.
Listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), Nykaa held a valuation of $6B at the time.

Project Context

In 2016, I was heading Product and Analytics at Nykaa. One of my key mandates was improving conversion rates during Mega Sales, which were high-stakes, high-volume events.

Mega Sales at Nykaa

• Happened every few months
• Generated 20 days worth of revenue in 2 days
• Brands offered deep discounts, driving major traffic spikes

Initial Metrics

• Regular conversion rate: 3–4%
• Traffic during Mega Sales: 4–5x increase
• Unexpected: conversion dropped to 2–3%

Despite massive traffic, we were leaking sales.

Sales Page Preparation

We invested heavily in creating visually appealing, high-converting sales landing pages.
Campaigns were designed to direct traffic here—but something wasn’t adding up.

Diagnostic Approach

I ran a comparative analysis: Sale vs. Non-Sale Periods across these metrics:

• Bounce rate
• Time on site
• Conversion rate
• Add to cart/session
• Entry page source
• Traffic distribution

Observations

• Product ads (Meta platforms) drove the most sales traffic—not sale page campaigns
• Product pages lacked sale messaging
• Homepage had a small sales banner, easily overlooked
• Users coming from product ads had low conversion
• 90% of users exited within 5 minutes if they didn’t add to cart
• Users who visited the sale page had 3x higher conversion
• But only 30% of users ever reached the sale page

Problem: We Had a Visibility Issue

Users were coming in from product ads but never saw our sale messaging.
The most valuable page (sales page) was buried. The problem wasn’t content—it was routing.

CRO Hypothesis

If we nudge users who don’t add to cart after 5 minutes toward the sale page, we’ll increase conversion.

Constraints

• Couldn’t clutter the homepage with more banners
• Needed a targeted, non-intrusive approach

Implementation Strategy

Trigger:

User spends 5 minutes on site without adding to cart

Action:

Display a bottom slider message:

“It seems like you’ve missed out on our best offers”

Segment:

Only users who matched the trigger condition

Tools:

We used a real-time event-based marketing tool to implement this.

Test:

A/B test on 10% of the cohort

Results

• CTR on slider: 65% (10x higher than typical promotional CTRs)
• Sales page traffic jumped from 30% → 50%
• Confirmed 3x conversion rate for sales page visitors
• Overall Mega Sale revenue increased by 10%

Long-Term Impact

• This strategy became a repeatable growth playbook
• Was reused in multiple Mega Sales events
• Eventually, the homepage itself became the sales page during peak events
• Organic traffic (60%) started converting better due to better routing

Key Learnings

• High traffic ≠ high conversion. Routing matters.
• Time-sensitive, behavioral nudges can outperform static banners.
• The best CRO wins are often simple, targeted, and data-backed.
• A great sale page is useless if no one sees it.

Final Thought

In e-commerce, contextual relevance and real-time behavioral cues often beat generic campaigns. This experience shaped how I think about CRO—not just as optimization, but as precision storytelling in real-time.