Bedstar x FERO x Magecloud

Meet Bedstar

Bedstar is one of the UK's longest-running online furniture and mattress retailers, founded at the very dawn of e-commerce. For over 25 years, director John Stalker has grown the business from a bold early bet on the internet into a well-established destination for beds, mattresses, and bedroom furniture. Long before most retailers considered selling online, Bedstar was already solving the hard problems: convincing suppliers, mastering specialist two-man delivery logistics, and building a store from scratch.

The Challenge

After two decades on an aging platform, Bedstar made the move to Magento around four years ago. The platform opened up enormous capability, but it also brought complexity. John found himself wrestling with integrations that should have been straightforward. A 0% finance module took three to four months of effort and never worked correctly. Apple Pay and Google Pay remained unactivated. The checkout itself was split across two pages, creating unnecessary friction in the most critical moment of the customer journey. The result was a checkout that John felt worked well enough, but one that was quietly losing customers at the final hurdle.

The Experiment

The introduction to FERO came through Bedstar's Magento agency, Magecloud. John had been working with Magecloud and founder Paul for around two years, handing off the technical complexity of Magento to a team with deep platform expertise. That relationship proved to be the catalyst.

"Paul said, look, I've put half a dozen of my customers already onto this and they've really seen some fantastic results. Just to get that recommendation from Paul, I'm pretty much ready to jump on and try it, because he's got the experience and seen these modules working on real-life websites and people's businesses."

The technical lift of deploying FERO Smart Checkout onto Bedstar's Magento store was handled smoothly in collaboration with Magecloud. Rather than months of integration headaches, the process moved quickly, with Magecloud's Magento expertise ensuring the implementation was clean and the A/B test could begin without delay. FERO ran a controlled experiment over three to four weeks, splitting traffic between the existing checkout and the new FERO Smart Checkout, so that every percentage point of change could be attributed with confidence.

"It's really important to have that A/B test. You're looking at the data from your current checkout to the new checkout, and once you're seeing the improvement, it's a no-brainer to say we're going to move forward with it."

The Results

The A/B test returned a 33% uplift in checkout conversion. For a retailer that has spent 25 years optimising every part of the customer journey, the result was striking.

"Yeah, 33, 34%. Which is huge. It's absolutely huge. I had my doubts slightly. I thought our current checkout worked quite well. But just to see those numbers, it was a complete eye opener. It's now making me look at other parts of the site to think, well, I'm probably going to be able to get that working better too."

Why It Worked

John identified several factors behind the uplift. The two-page checkout became a single, continuous flow. Payment methods surfaced intelligently, matching the right option to the right device and user behaviour, finally bringing Apple Pay and Google Pay into play for Bedstar customers. The UX felt fresher and more deliberate, with progressive disclosure guiding shoppers through each step only as they needed it, reducing noise and keeping focus on completing the purchase. As John put it, referencing the classic usability principle: "There's a book called Don't Make Me Think. Just tell me what to do and I'll do it. And that's exactly what it is."