Tell me
honestly — is your e-commerce website optional? Or does it really mean some
serious business for you? I ask because if your site is really something you
value, then you absolutely need to understand the power of A/B testing.
You invest
a lot of time, money and effort into making your online store successful. And
when you’re receiving tons of traffic, it’s natural for you to hesitate in
making even a small change on the website. Okay, you “feel” like it should help
increase your conversion rate. But the doubt remains — what if it backfires?
You
probably have a lot of ideas in the back of your head about changes in your
heading, discount offers, pricing, layout, and so on. But maybe the fear of
plummeting conversion rates has always stopped you from trying them out.
That’s
where A/B testing can really move the needle. It allows you to measure the
success of proposed changes while limiting potential damage.
What is
A/B testing, exactly?
Imagine
how great it would be if you could just poll your live visitors and ask if they
would like a certain change on the website or not. Unfortunately, that’s not
how it works.
A/B
testing lets you do something very similar, except people will not even be
aware that they are voting for something. It allows you to make two versions of
your landing page. The first will be the Control page, which is the original
page on your site. The second is the Variation page, which will be nearly
identical to the Control except for the one change that you want to test. These
two versions are then tested with live visitors on your site to check the
conversion rate and find the winning page.
Here’s a
visual of how A/B testing works:
The Optima Kart
Your
testing goal can be anything from selling more of a certain product to site
engagement, form completion and more. The goal completion of every visitor is
tracked for both versions of the page and the winning version is declared once
statistical confidence of the data has been achieved.
How
does A/B testing help e-commerce sites in damage control?
Sometimes
when you’re apprehensive about changing your website, trying out a variation
that seems to have, say, a 50-50 chance of success requires courage. After all,
if the variation doesn’t get the desired response, it can cause lost leads or
conversions. And if yours is a website that receives heavy traffic, that loss can
accumulate and become overwhelming within a day or two.
A/B
testing tools help you keep that potential damage in check. For instance, you
could show the Variation page to only 20% of your visitors, while the remaining
80% of the visitors still see the Control. You test the two versions of the web
page with your live visitors and see how they respond to the change. You can
always change the percentage who see the variation according to your specific
requirements.
You can
even track your revenue while this test is going on, and see for yourself which
page (Control or Variation) is performing better for your unique set of
visitors. As the statistical confidence of the test is achieved (based on the
number of visitors on the site), the winning page is declared.
In simple
terms, you’re no longer hanging in limbo, contemplating if you should go ahead
with making a permanent change to your site. You simply A/B test for a few days
and get a definite answer based on facts and proven data. After all, it’s about
what works for you and not what you think should work.
A/B
Testing has gone Mainstream
The
primary reasons why A/B testing has become increasingly popular for e-commerce
sites of all sizes and a must for e-commerce giants like Amazon and Ebay:
1. Major
potential for improvement — There are so many elements to an e-commerce site
that it presents a multitude of opportunities for testing: from the checkout
process and product pages to site layout, or even a complete design overhaul.
2.
Conversion rates directly impact revenue — For e-commerce sites, the impact of
A/B testing can be directly measured in terms of revenue. It’s not about lead
generation, form filling, brochure download or anything else; it’s a direct
sale. Successful tests can help you reduce your cart abandonment rates and
average order value, or analyze your user behavior to find out what interests
them on your site and what doesn’t. This case study details how SlideShop.com
increased their sales by 15% just by testing three simple changes to their checkout
page.
Tests
to try for optimized conversion
If you’re
considering A/B testing your site, here are some of the most commonly tested
elements for e-commerce sites:
Pricing
and Shipping Strategies
Many
people would visit your site just to take a look around, check out the latest
products, etc. But how do you reel in those window shoppers and make them click
that “buy now” button?
We all
know pricing greatly influences consumer decisionmaking. So how do you make it
work in your favor and not against? Should you start ending your prices with
.99 or other variations as seen in tons of other stores (you can see the
pattern of ending prices with 95 in the image below, taken from Jabong.com)?
How is your latest discount offer working for you? Should your prices be
displayed on the left-hand or right-hand side of the image? Are your visitors
abandoning carts after seeing your shipping charges?
You can
find answers to all of this and more through A/B testing your website.
Product
Pages and Product Filters
There are
so many things you can test on your product pages. For example, Mall.cz raised
their conversions by 9% by increasing the size of their product images. Of
course, there are best practices that you can implement and test right away,
like placing “buy now” buttons above the fold, using bright and contrasting
button colors (as you can see on Sony’s official website), including trust
badges, and so on.
Some of
you may wonder why you should A/B test if these are proven practices. That’s
the whole deal with A/B testing — you can never be sure about the results until
you test them on live visitors. But in other tests, including product filters
has been found to be a good practice that increases revenue.
For some
sites, displaying best-selling products may work better for cross selling. For
others, showing the latest products might be more effective. Similarly, you can
test which search result pattern works best for you: the grid or the list. You
can even test if cross-selling increases revenue (by providing more choices and
encouraging customers to buy more), or decreases revenue (by offering too many
choices and confusing your customers about what they should buy).
Once you
get into the groove of A/B testing, the entire site is your playground. Figure
out a solution to reduce your cart abandonment rates, try out different product
page layouts, experiment with product descriptions, headlines, button
placement/colors and more — and track your revenue for each of them.
You might
not always find that your changes work, but many times they will. And moving
forward, the insights into shopper behavior will help you make your site a lot
more effective and eliminate the friction that causes lost sales.
The
best part is that you do not have to be a techie to get started with A/B
testing. With tools like Visual Website Optimizer, it takes just a few minutes
to create a test and you don’t need any knowledge of HTML or coding. Try out
A/B testing and see how it works for you
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