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How Can A/B Testing Help Increase Conversions on Your E-Commerce Store?

Is your e-commerce site successful? You can measure the success of an e-commerce store site through the revenue it generates and its conversion rates. Now, the challenge is effectively measuring and growing these metrics and that is where A/B testing comes in. In this article, we gonna cover-up how A/B testing helps for better ROI for your e-commerce store.

What is the Importance of A/B testing in E-commerce?

Also known as split testing, A/B testing is the process of determining which design, content, functionality, and other aspects of your website work best. During testing, variations of your sites are used, and the best version is selected based on customer experience. For instance, you can test different content layouts for products and determine which drives more sales. Or, you can test different navigation designs.

These tests are essential in e-commerce websites as it improves the shopping experience of your customers. With satisfied and happy customers, your site will have more click-through rates and conversions, fewer complaints, and strong customer loyalty — all these factors lead to more revenue, which is the goal of an e-commerce store.

The Requirements of Testing

Unfortunately, not all e-commerce websites^[1] are good candidates for testing. According to Optimizely, split testing only makes sense if you have enough traffic. These tests are run on your sites’ visitors and should be executed for at least a week. For that reason, your website needs to have at least 5,000 visitors per week.

The only way you might not need as much traffic is you have a high conversion rate. Why? With a high conversion rate, you need a smaller sample size for each experiment. Without enough traffic and a good conversion rate, you will have to run tests for an extended period.

Gather Data

Before testing, research and analyze problems in your site – you cannot just run random tests. There are two ways to gather data:

• Analytics. Tools such as Google Analytics give you useful insights into your site’s traffic, bounce rates, conversion rates, and the key phrases that land your visitors to your site. The bounce rate data is the best place to start identifying problems.
• Usability testing: This testing helps you understand the why behind the analytics data. It enables you to know how and why people are struggling to use your website.

Now you know the problems on your site. The next step is to develop a testing hypothesis. Start by establishing what your goal is – what do you want to measure. It could be the conversion rate or user experience. Then, determine the problem to solve with the test.

Let’s say, through analytics, you noticed that people are dropping off between the shopping cart page and the checkout phase. And, through usability testing, you realized that customers do not understand how to move forward to check out. Then, the goal of your tests should be easy navigation and reducing the number of information customers have to process to get to check out.

Test Multiple Elements

You hope to achieve a goal or a set of goals through testing. Either way, there are several factors on your site that affect the success of accomplishing these goals. Remember, each element has a different impact on the customer experience.

Tracking multiple elements has two main advantages: you learn which factors have the most significant impact on customer experience and why. The why helps you create a better e-commerce business site. Test the layout, content, and style of the product page.

In most cases, the product page is where a potential customer first lands. This page is essential as it:

• Informs the customer about the product
• Explains why they should buy the product

In simpler terms, the product page converts a visitor into a buyer. So, it should be optimized to convince the user to purchase. The content, style, and layout of this page play an important role in convincing a buyer. For, instance, too much information on the page tends to confuse buyers.

Test different positions of elements, and vary the images and texts. Then see which design changes work best.

You are trying to answer questions such as:

• Is the text field too long?
• Could a different color of the “Add to Cart” button work best?
• Are there too many images?

Always Be Testing

After testing, there are three possible results – the test failed, did not do anything, or it won. Whatever the outcome, you learn something from each test. The most important thing to note is that testing is not a one-time thing. It is a repetitive process. The results of one test form a hypothesis for the next test.

Testing your e-commerce site is like maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It has to be done consistently for better results. In the beginning, you will not notice significant improvements^[2]. But after several months, you will look back and not regret your decision to conduct split testing

Conclusion

A/B testing is an iterative process that when done right, will contribute to significant improvements in your e-commerce store. You need it even if you believe your site has a good conversion rate – there is always room for improvement. It can be frustrating at first, but if you collect the right data and conduct relevant tests, it will produce good results.

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