Adding an Orchard Planner to Trees.com's Fruit Tree Page — Making Sure the Trees You Buy Will Actually Fruit
Hypothesis: Shoppers don't want to become pollination experts; they want trees that fruit. If the page does the four checks for them and hands back a complete, working orchard in one step, more shoppers should buy the partner trees they need, and fewer should end up with trees that never bloom.
Brand of the Week
Trees.com, formerly Fast Growing Trees, sells trees, shrubs and plants online with the promise of "Healthy Plants, Guaranteed": more than 1,600 varieties, a 1-year Alive & Thrive guarantee, and over 102,000 five-star reviews. Fruit trees are the hardest category to sell well, because success depends on more than the tree itself: the right climate zone, a state it can ship to, a partner for pollination and a harvest that fits the shopper's plans.
Why we're testing this
A fruit tree is a long bet: a shopper buys now and finds out a year or two later whether it worked. When a tree needs a pollination partner and the page never says so, the cost shows up in reviews, like "half died or never bloomed" and "we thought it was supposed to fruit during the first year." The primary metric we'd watch is Add to Cart rate on fruit trees, along with average items per fruit-tree order, since a good orchard plan adds partner trees to the cart. We'd also track planner opens and completion, and whether "never fruited" complaints and returns fall over time.
The challenge
We took a peek at Trees.com's fruit tree page, and three things caught our attention.
The four checks that decide whether an orchard fruits live in four different places. Zone sits in the header and card tags. State shipping restrictions only show on the product page, after ZIP entry. Pollination hides in a collapsed accordion about 3,000px below Add to Cart. Harvest season sits in the spec table.
The buy boxes don't say what the trees need. Honeycrisp, Rainier, Bing and Fuji need a second variety to fruit, and none of their buy boxes says so. The 2-Pack discount sells two of the same variety, which can't pollinate each other, and the cart upsells size and planting kits, never a partner.
The cost shows up in reviews, and the page itself adds to the effort. "Half died or never bloomed." "We thought it was supposed to fruit during the first year." Meanwhile the fruit page leads with 18 category tiles, three rows deep, pushing the actual products further down.
So what would we A/B test?
Control: The fruit tree page as it stands — 18 category tiles in three rows leading the page, product cards that show a zone tag but not what each tree needs, and pollination, state restrictions and harvest timing spread across the product page, an accordion and the spec table.
Variant (built in MidaGX): The category tiles collapse to one row on desktop, with the last slot opening the rest ("All fruit categories (18)"). Under them sits a slim planner bar styled like a wide category tile: "Plan an orchard that fruits," with the shopper's zone. Tapping it opens the planner in place. The shopper picks a fruit (chips show only fruits rated for their zone) and a tree count from 1 to 5, defaulting to 2. The planner then builds a complete orchard from live site data: every tree that needs a partner gets one from its own partner list, every tree grows in the shopper's zone and ships to their state, and harvests spread across seasons. Pick one tree and it chooses one that fruits alone. The result is drawn as an orchard row, with canopy size matching mature width, a dashed arc marking each pollination pair and a total row length. Any tree can be swapped; the replacement keeps its slot and the pairing repairs itself. "Add 2 trees to cart" adds every line through the site's own cart, then opens the cart.
Our hypothesis
Shoppers don't want to become pollination experts; they want trees that fruit. If the page does the four checks for them and hands back a complete, working orchard in one step, more shoppers should buy the partner trees they need, and fewer should end up with trees that never bloom.
The CRO principle underneath
This is the idea of the guided path: when success depends on several conditions the shopper can't easily check alone, the page should do the checking for them. Every fact the planner uses was already on the site; it was just scattered, and putting it together turns a research project into one clear next step.
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