The world of online shopping is expanding at a rapid pace, and one of the reasons why it is so successful is that eCommerce platforms are providing users with a lot of customer experience. In addition to this, more than 44.5% of businesses around the world believe customer experience is the most competitive ground where a user makes the decision about doing business with the brand or not. But when it comes to creating a quality experience, you cannot go with your intuition because something that you might like may not be a personal preference of your customers. As a result, to be a successful owner of an online business, you need to have tangible insights into what your audience is looking for when they visit your website.
Now in order to find these insights, A/B testing can be pretty valuable. It is one of the best testing methods to find out which elements of your website are performing well and adding to your experience. While at the same time, you can clearly find out other elements that are creating problems for the users making the whole user experience underwhelming. With the help of this article, we are going to show you how the implementation of A/B testing in eCommerce can be beneficial. Furthermore, we will showcase various areas of eCommerce where one can use A/B testing to find out valuable insights into their business and customers, so let’s begin!
What Is A/B Testing?
A/B testing is also known as split testing, in which you get to find out the most successful design, template, or other forms of elements that are present on your website. It is a method of testing and then comparing the results of a variety of elements present on a page. With this, you get to find out what appeals to your customers the most when they visit your website. A/B testing is not a one-go testing methodology, and you constantly need to work on it and make improvements based on the results of your eCommerce layout.
For example, you are testing out two different types of templates you use for the content on your emails. Here you will test which of the two designs is performing better than the other one and is giving you the highest sales conversions. On the other hand, with the use of A/B testing, you could also find a more suitable option for the theme of your product page.
With A/B testing, you are continuously improving your design and product pages. As a result, over time, you get to align your eCommerce according to customer behavior. So it can perform better and yield better revenue.
Why Perform A/B Testing For Your eCommerce Website?
Now you might be asking a question as to why you need A/B testing on your eCommerce website when it is already performing so well. The answer is you cannot be perfect, and when it comes to online business or even a website, you have to find new ways to attract more customers. Otherwise, someone else is going to take over your audience and will make sales accordingly.
Companies such as Amazon, PayPal, Dell, and others have achieved significant success as they consistently perform A/B testing and mold their websites according to the results shown. The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, said in an interview that one needs to perform more experiments to find out innovative results to help a business grow. A/B testing is designed in a way that sets you apart from the competition, and it is the best way by which you can create a segment of your customers.
1. Benefits Of A/B Testing
There are a number of benefits that you get to enjoy when using A/B testing to find out the best elements for your website. A/B testing can reduce the bounce rate, increase your user engagement, lower the risks of content burnout, and more. In this section, we have discussed some of the significant benefits you as an eCommerce business owner to gets to enjoy with A/B testing.
2. Better User Engagement
One of the most challenging things on the internet is to make people happy when they visit your website and make them stay for a more extended period. With A/B testing, you can improve your content step by step, which ultimately results in increasing engagement. Once you are done with the test, you start looking for the results and find out a partner in user behavior. Once you get the hang of this pattern, you get to make changes to your website or make well-informed decisions that are backed by result data for the increase in engagement.
You will be surprised to see how a small change that you made by understanding the result of A/B testing can have such a massive impact on user engagement. A/B testing can be used in a number of instances. You can use it on the color scheme of your website, button layout, scroll speed, text size, and more. Anything which is present on your eCommerce website can be used as an element for A/B testing.
3. Reduction In Your Bounce Rates
The thing with analytics is that it can tell you what needs to be optimized. In addition to this, you could find out areas on your website where you are getting high traffic. Even low conversions from high drop-off pages can be reversed as well. So overall, with the use of A/B testing, you get to test out all the new ideas you have in mind that results in the improvement of your page. Everyone wants to keep their users active on the website as long as possible, this can be done, but you need to know where your website is lacking in terms of catching up the user’s attention. There could be chances that your content, image, or even blog post headlines are off-setting. With the A/B test, you get to test out what can be done to reduce the bounce rate of your website or even for a specific web page. So that visitors can stay on it for a much longer time.
4. Lowering Your Risk Percentage
A/B testing is known to help companies and businesses to lower their risks in various areas. This is done by providing companies a reliable and resourceful data that backs up why a particular thing will work and why it won’t. With this information, you can make a much better decision and don’t have to rely on any form of guesswork. Likewise, there is a unique feature called flag, which can be used during the testing. When you put a flag in the testing phase, you can quickly roll back to your previous form, line of code, theme, and more if the new update seems to be causing a significant negative impact on your goals.
5. Creating Effective Copy
Not only does A/B testing helps you in improving the user experience of your website. It can also provide you with a great deal of knowledge about what people want to read when they visit your website. In the end, it is the copy on your website that the user is going to read. The color, theme, button template, scrolling animation, and other elements are all secondary things to enhance the user experience. A/B testing is a method of testing out your website to get trustful and data-backed information. With the use of A/B testing, one is able to extract the maximum amount of value from the production tests and get the most of your return on investment.
Where Can You Perform A/B Testing On Ecommerce Website?
Well, every eCommerce business is unique in its own way, but all of them create content and website for online users. As a result, there are a number of elements that A/B testing can use to find out which one of them is better than the other for the eCommerce business.
1. Free Shipping
Everyone loves getting their product for free, but before you implement free shipping on your product, you need to compare the sales performance of that specific niche. To find out whether having free shipping does make any difference in sales numbers. In a lot of cases, a shipping cost added to the purchase case is one of the most common reasons for high cart abandonment rates. Thus, it is the area eCommerce businesses are looking to find a breakthrough and make themselves stand apart from the rest of the competition.
On the other hand, A/B testing can also be used to find whether using free shipping lowers the cart abandonment rate or not. This way, you will have a clear picture of whether to include free shipping or not with the following set of products. If you check online, there are a number of companies that have abandoned the shipping cost from their specific list of items as one of the reasons was it leads to higher conversions.
2. Click Through Rate (CTR)
For any business, a CTR is that one button that drives your eCommerce sales. But when it comes to finding out the ideal button size, its color, and where to put it on your web page, email and ads can only be determined with a little bit of experimentation using A/B testing.
You can start this experimentation by putting two CTA on a single web page. To create some difference in these two buttons, it could be simple as increasing the size of one then the other. This way, you will not confuse the customers, and they will know which one is the primary CTA button.
In addition to this, make sure you test out the phrase written in the CTA button. Phrases like “buy now,” “click here,” “free trial,” “join for free,” and more creates a sense of urgency that allows users to make an immediate decision and press the button. When using a CTA for the submission of a form or signing up for a newsletter, it is better to test out the “Submit” and “Apply” phrases on your button. To find which one suits your context in the best way possible.
3. Product Page Theme
When creating a product page, you have to create the best user experience, which underlines all the sales and marketing techniques to make users buy that product. The product page needs to appeal to the target audiences and compel them to commit to a necessary action when they visit it. Test out the different locations where you can place the image of your product. Check what information has to be put at first and which one the user isn’t interested in seeing on top. Let’s take the example of eBay to understand how they used A/B testing for their homepage. When you go to the homepage of eBay, you will find out that it contains a number of colorful images. These images are of the products that are most popular in their categories. Apart from that, these products have some of the best deals that a user can get if they buy the product.
While on the product page, there are lot more details present the same from there; a user can go through the product description and purchase the product. But the homepage is the one that compels users to open those product categories in the first place.
4. Headline Test
The thing with the headline is that it needs to be catchy and attractive and needs to have customer-friendly text. With A/B testing, you get to test out which of the headline is performing better conversion rates than the other. Variations in wording will also help in tracking down a number of metrics such as how many shares the page has, its bounce rate, click-through rate, and even the average reading time. All metrics could be analyzed and make them performed for the betterment of sales.
With A/B testing, you get to determine which of the variant from your list is suitable for your eCommerce website. It will send the percentage of users to different headlines for testing purposes and compare the results of each variant with others.
5. Typography
This one is the last example of where you can perform A/B testing on your eCommerce website. Typography is the one area that many marketers don’t believe in having a significant impact on user behavior. With A/B testing, you get to find out clear fonts and layouts which does not distract your readers. Brands like Apple use minimum context on their product page and leave plenty of white space. In addition to this, Apple uses massive font sizes, so it becomes more accessible for people to read the content with ease.
The Typography you are using for the eCommerce website needs to represent both your brand culture and customer preference. The less complex your web page seems to users, the higher conversion rates you will be able to achieve.
Conclusion
So there you have it, this is what eCommerce A/B testing is all about. It is all about comparing the elements present on your webpage and seeing which one aligns best with your goals. As a digital marketer, you need to understand how important it is to perform A/B testing not only on eCommerce websites but on all websites in general. With a better knowledge of what customers like and don’t like, you could increase the click-through rate, conversions, and sales as well.
When the execution of A/B testing has been done well, it leads to a tremendous amount of success for an online business as it makes your brand picture itself as the one that listens to its customers and always looks to provide the best user experience according to their interests.
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Simran works as a technical writer. The graduate in MS Computer Science from the well known CS hub, aka Silicon Valley, is also an editor of the website. She enjoys writing about any tech topic, including programming, algorithms, cloud, data science, and AI. Traveling, sketching, and gardening are the hobbies that interest her.
