If you run an eCommerce website, A/B testing could be key in helping you to optimise your pages, increase conversion rate and ultimately get more customers through your virtual doors.
Did you know as many as 77.3% of online orders are abandoned prior to purchase?
That means most people who have landed on your site and added something to their basket have then decided to leave without going through with their order.
If you could reduce the number of abandoned carts, think about what this could mean for your business.
But how do we find out what’s causing them to leave early and – more importantly – how do we rectify this?
One way to get to the root of this is A/B testing. With an A/B test, you create two variations of a specific page on your site and test it to see which one performs better.
See our guides on how to run a successful A/B test here:
- Three Things To Do Before You Start an A/B Test
- Three Things To Remember During an A/B Test
- Three Actions To Take After An A/B Test
What can A/B testing achieve for eCommerce sites?
A/B testing your eCommerce website can help you with many different goals, including:
- Increasing the average value of an order.
- Optimising the checkout process.
- Reducing cart abandonment rate.
The important thing is to only focus on one goal for each A/B test. Without a clear goal, you won’t know what to measure. It’s tempting to want to achieve all these things at once, but by prioritising what matters to you the most, you can get more out of your results.
What things should I A/B test for my eCommerce site?
The area of your site which you test is entirely up to you; it could be that you change a piece of copy, a headline or a call to action. Alternatively, you could test the positioning of certain elements on a page.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
- The call to action on a product page.
- The description of a product.
- A banner on a home page.
- Where the delivery cost is displayed.
- Whether or not free delivery is highlighted.
- A visible shopping cart.
Ways to further optimise your eCommerce site.
Alongside A/B testing, there are other ways you can improve the performance of your retail website. We actually have a guide to improving conversion for eCommerce sites here.
Page load time may seem like a small, insignificant factor, but a one-second delay can decrease your conversion rate by 7%. Meanwhile, 79% of customers won’t even return to your site if it has poor performance.
Additionally, a lengthy, complex checkout process could be your problem. Ideally, you want your customers to find what they’re looking for and complete their purchase within as few clicks as possible. Our blog on Hick’s Law discusses how Amazon achieves this with their One-Click purchasing.
Want to find out more about how to improve and optimise your eCommerce website? Speak with a member of our team right now.
