Make the Most of Promising A/B Tests

Founder of CXL and conversion expert Peep Laja walks through moves to improve conversions on your site in his article, “Top 20 A/B Ecommerce Test Ideas.” While he writes that, “there’s nothing that always works and pretty much nothing that never works either. Websites are highly contextual,” he provides test ideas (or rather test result hypotheses) that will probably work for you. I heartily second his disclaimer that these are tests and not solutions, but they provide some great inspiration for ways to get going with your optimization efforts. In this blog, I’ll highlight some tests from Laja’s list along with some interesting examples we’ve come across with SiteSpect’s solution.

Prominent Free Shipping Information

People love free shipping, and in many cases prominently advertising that helps conversions. But for some brands that doesn’t seem financially feasible. Luckily, there are some creative ways to apply this logic through threshold testing. Take the idea from testing your free shipping threshold (at what price point, or on what items, does free shipping increase revenue) and apply it to sale items, special offers, or limited time deals. In addition to free shipping, you should test your urgency threshold and your inventory alerts (if you’re in retail).

Search Bar More Prominent

Online shoppers have a mission, and the easier you make it to jump into the search bar the better. But there’s a catch! While a big, well designed search bar will certainly attract use, the function has to be up to snuff in order to pay off. Testing to improve search bar use is a great place to start, but don’t stop there. Keep optimizing your back end search function to the get the biggest revenue increase.

Expand Payment Options

People are picky, and for good reason. Laja mentions that “some people are wary of using credit cards for online payments” and that “50 percent of those who don’t regularly shop online said that if their preferred payment method isn’t available, they’ll cancel their purchase.” But, there’s really no way to know what payment method or methods will have the most impact on your conversion rates without running vendor comparison tests. Some customers find that one, secure credit card payment option maximizes conversions. Others find that Masterpass brings in more conversions than PayPal or vice versa.

Take Advice and Keep Going

There is a lot of great CRO advice out there, and general rules of thumb for how to optimize your site. But, the best advice I can give is to always test the next stage after the big change. Sure, implement a more prominent search bar, but then also test what happens after customers use it. Offer free shipping if you’d like, but test until you find where it’s most effective. For a checklist to get you testing at every stage of the customer journey, you can download the eBook “Prepare for Takeoff: Testing Strategies to Optimize the Customer Journey.” For some stellar case studies, check out our blog series.

Read More from Commodore Kate

Kate Orchard works directly with SiteSpect users as a CRO to help them get the most out of the platform and their brand. She also happens to be a real life Commodore, and we think that gives her an extra heir of mystery and authority.