How to Get Started with Ecommerce A/B Testing

Behind the scenes of all those flashy product images and captivating categories, ecommerce businesses continuously work to improve their website’s user experience. One of the ways they do this is A/B testing (or split testing). 

Ecommerce A/B testing works to understand consumer behavior and optimize the online shopping experience. It does so by showing two different versions of a web page to different groups of a target audience. 

Data shows that A/B testing is the second most popular conversion rate optimization (CRO) method that companies use – which proves that there’s plenty of merit to the strategy. Whether it’s a change in wording or a swap in color, imagine being able to convert a much greater amount of leads just by tweaking your website design.

Why A/B Testing Is Important

The ultimate goal of ecommerce A/B testing is determining how your website will perform at its best. What changes could you make to improve metrics like improving average order value (AOV) or lead to more conversions? With split testing, businesses can compare two versions of a webpage or digital asset to determine that. The different versions usually consist of a current version (A) and an altered version (B). Once the altered version is successful a new variant can be created to further optimize the page.

There’s no question that online shopping is highly competitive. While customers can visit a mall and select from the stores available there, the digital ecommerce space is endless, with an estimated 24 million ecommerce sites around the world in 2022.

A/B testing lets businesses improve their overall shopping experience by understanding their customers better and then delivering exactly what they’re looking for. The entire process can help you get answers to important business questions, generate more revenue from existing customers, and even provide information for future marketing strategies.

With this hard data to base your decisions on, you can make changes to the design and UX of your website rooted in solid facts. Small tweaks to your checkout process, product pages, or home page can lead to a substantial increase in conversion rates, and A/B testing can help you keep up with changes in consumer behavior and trends.

The Basics of A/B Testing

Before starting an A/B test, there needs to be a theory based on what area of the site you think can be improved. For example, you might think changing the color of your ‘Add to Cart’ button from red to green will increase click-through rates.

The golden rule of A/B testing is to only test one thing at a time. If you change multiple things on a page at once, like fonts, headlines, colors, and images, it becomes impossible to figure out which one of these changes influenced the results – for better or for worse.

When you stick to one change, like the color of a button in our example, you can eventually associate any increase or decrease in conversions to that specific change. It’s all about understanding how things work behind the test and creating a meaningful theory.

If you’re interested in testing multiple variables at once, you can use an advanced version of A/B testing called ecommerce multivariate testing. With this type of testing you’re able to test multiple variables to see which combination performs the best out of all of them. While you can look into how specific elements interact with each other and influence user behavior, it’ll require a larger sample size to produce accurate results.

Things to Test

There’s certainly no shortage of variables you can tweak, but figuring out which changes will have the biggest impact on your ecommerce site can take some time. So, what are some things you can test? Let’s look at a few elements that could bring about results.

• Pricing – Testing customers’ responses to different prices can give you a closer look into their buying behavior. Are they sensitive to cost, or do they value product quality more? You can also experiment with incentives like free shipping to find out what is most appealing to your customers.
• Headlines – Being the first thing that visitors read on a webpage, headlines can be very influential on shopping behavior. Maybe a different headline style – like one with more personality – is more effective in getting people to make a purchase?
• Product Names – Just like headlines, the product names themselves can play a major role in attracting customer attention. Do straightforward descriptive names work, or is it worth playing around with a different creative naming strategy?
• Description Text – The way you describe your products outside of their product names also influences conversions. Perhaps your customers are more responsive to emotive storytelling or, alternatively, prefer an overview of the key features through concise bullet points.
• ‘Buy Now’ Button Copy – Little changes to your call-to-action button for purchasing can sometimes end up changing your click-through rates. If your initial copy was ‘Buy Now,’ you could test other versions like ‘Add to Cart’ or ‘Proceed to Checkout.’
• Social Proof – In 2021, 36.4% of people read between 1 and 3 reviews before making a purchase. Placing testimonials, customer reviews, and ratings on the product page or somewhere else on your site can significantly affect purchase decisions.
• Product Photos – Apart from being high-quality, you can get creative with other variables like image size, number of images, angles, or even product videos to see what resonates most with your customers.
• Navigation Menu – Your site’s architecture has a huge influence on the customer shopping experience. The navigation menu is a big part of that, making it either difficult or effortless for them to look for specific products or categories. Experimenting with the order of items, fonts, icons, and types of menus can all be worthwhile.
• Page Layouts – How elements are laid out on each page can help guide your customers through the buying process. For example, one-column versus multi-column layouts or ordering the most important items at the top of the page and the less important elements at the bottom.

The Benefits of A/B Testing

Relies on data

With A/B testing, you won’t have to worry about personal opinions or biases. It’s goodbye assumptions and hello concrete data, where you can make informed decisions and get a reliable understanding of how changes to your online store can impact your metrics.

Lets you test before launching

A/B testing doesn’t force you to commit to a complete launch. It lets businesses go through many iterations of trial and error of much smaller ideas without the fear of driving away your entire audience. With so many opportunities to test, they can check out how customers are reacting to these changes before making them permanent.

Improves return on ad spend

Optimizing your website through A/B testing makes it more likely that visitors coming in from paid campaigns land on a site designed for maximum conversions. If you take the time to touch on every aspect of the customer lifecycle, your return on ad spend (ROAS) improves.

Reduce cart abandonment

Based on data from the Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is 70.19%. While the reasons for abandonment range from high extra costs to mandatory account creation, 18% say it has to do with an overly complex checkout process, and 17% say they couldn’t see the total order cost upfront – which are two things businesses can quickly change. 

By testing elements of the checkout process or altering button and information placement, you can identify those friction points that lead to cart abandonment and fix them to ensure better conversion rates.

Reduce acquisition costs

Customer acquisition is a strategic and often costly part of running an ecommerce store – it includes everything from advertising to social media and search engine marketing. Studies even show that securing a new customer can cost 5 to 7 times more than retaining an existing one. So, when you continually improve the user experience of your store through regular tests, you improve your chances of gaining more conversions from existing customers.

Increased ecommerce conversion rate

All these benefits we’ve discussed boil down to the main benefit of A/B testing – increasing conversion rates. Whether you’re a small startup or a large enterprise, the smallest change can make a huge statement. In fact, Amazon simply moved credit card offers from its home page to the shopping cart page, and it boosted profits by tens of millions of dollars annually.

A/B testing relies on tangible data, can improve ad performance, and reduces cart abandonment and acquisition costs, all while boosting conversions. With this in mind, it’s clear why many successful ecommerce businesses have A/B testing as part of their core strategy.

Examples of Successful A/B Tests

There’s hardly a better example of a successful A/B test than Google’s shades of blue experiment. Google executive Marissa Meyer led a project to test the impact of using different colored links in ads. And it wasn’t different colors like pink, green, yellow, and orange – it was minute changes in shades of blue. While it may sound nonsensical to many, it might not sound that way when you hear that the company earned an extra $200m a year in revenue.

The experiment was prompted when the company noticed that Google ad and Gmail ad links were in different shades of blue. They used A/B testing to see which shades of blue people liked the most based on how much they clicked on the ads. The result? They learned that a mildly purpler shade of blue led to more clicks than a slightly greener shade of blue. And thus, this little change was able to earn them an immense increase in revenue from ads.

But, of course, Google isn’t the only mega-company to have achieved some significant results. An employee at Bing, Microsoft’s own search engine, came up with the idea to change the way the site displayed ad headlines. While it didn’t generate the $200 million that Google was able to, annual revenue increased by over $100 million.

While these are widely successful examples from large organizations, what about specific examples that are more applicable to ecommerce?

Let’s look at HubSpot, a CRM platform known for their well-rounded approach to business growth. They sought to improve their email engagement rate by experimenting with text alignment. In their A/B test, they sent both centered email text to users and emails with left-justified text to another group and found that emails with left-aligned text got fewer clicks.

Similarly, they also decided to see if changing up their hero image would impact user behavior and conversions. In addition to their existing hero image, they had two other variants – variant B with more vibrant images, colorful text and shapes, and an animated headline, and variant C with color, movement, and animated images. The results showed that variant B outperformed the control by 6% and was projected to prompt around 375 more monthly signups.

How to Determine a Winner During an A/B Test

Running an A/B test is only the start of the experiment, as the rest relies on an accurate interpretation of the results to declare a winner. The best way to do this is to look at the statistical significance of the analysis, where a result is usually considered significant if there’s less than a 5% probability that the results happened by coincidence. 

It’s an accurate, mathematical way to see whether the results of your A/B test came together by chance or truly reflect a pattern. After all, there are often other factors at play that may have coincidentally led to changes in conversion. These might include:

• Seasonal Trends – Depending on the time of the year, customers will display different shopping behaviors. The lead-up to Christmas is a particularly busy shopping time that could show a much starker contrast than quieter times of the year. Or, if you’re a store that sells seasonal goods like modern swimwear, certain seasons will likely amp up sales on your ecommerce store.

• Holidays – People shop differently on holidays, so running a test on a significant day like Black Friday might end up providing you with skewed data. Most shoppers enjoy attractive discounts, which makes them more likely to shop on days they can get a good deal. The end of the year might bring about an increase in customers, given that as of October 2023, 40% of U.S. consumers had already started holiday shopping.

• Economic Issues – Economic factors such as a recession could also influence final results, where buyers would be more cautious about their spending. They might not have the disposable income previously available, and the results may not represent their usual shopping habits.

• Launch of a New Marketing Campaign – If you’ve launched a big marketing campaign during your A/B test, it might attract a chunk of new visitors who don’t behave the same way as your regular customers.

Whenever you decide to conduct your A/B test, you should account for the many other variables that can influence your results. Making sure you control external factors as much as possible and interpreting the results as carefully as you can, you’ll increase your chances of accurate findings.

How to Run Your Own A/B Tests with Shogun

Now that we’ve reviewed the benefits of A/B testing and provided you with a few ideas for getting started, let’s go over exactly what you need to do to set up your own experiments. 

Shogun A/B Testing makes it easy. You can get a brand new experiment up and running by just following three simple steps:

Step 1. After downloading Shogun A/B Testing from the Shopify App Store, open the app and click on the “Create test” button. You’ll find that there are several different types of tests to choose from, including page tests, split URL tests, template tests, theme tests, and price tests.

Step 2. Once you’ve selected which type of test you want to create, you’ll be taken to the test settings page.

Your experiments in Shogun A/B Testing are highly customizable.

First of all, you’ll need to choose a goal for your test. There are a few pre-set options available, such as conversion rate and average order value, or you could set up a custom event to track. 

You can also determine how the percentage of traffic is split up between the original version and the new variant, and you have the ability to target your test to a particular segment of your visitors as well. 

Step 3. Whenever you’re done with the settings, go ahead and publish your test. You’ll then be able to review the performance of both the original version and the new variant in real-time. Shogun even keeps track of statistical significance for you, so you’ll know when you’ve collected enough data to confidently declare a winner.

That’s it! Depending on the results of your test, you can either revert back to the original version or fully implement the new variant. Shogun allows you to complete either action with just a couple clicks.

With Shogun A/B Testing, you’ll be able to quickly conduct countless ecommerce experiments and discover all sorts of new ways to improve your online store.