During my career I have gone through numerous A/B-testing for multiple companies within different industries, both e-com and OMNI-channel. It’s a great way to determine if a change to the site or the user experience is applicable and will actually improve your performance in relation to your business goals. In this article I will give you some ideas that are almost bullet proof to increase CR, but as you will learn from below, you should consider testing them anyway, and in different ways and setup, to get the data and the track record. It is also of great importance to be aware of your goal and purpose with the test; are you looking for more transactions, a higher AOV, or to cut costs? We have also learned that depending on your business, the results can be very different.

1. Start page - Remove automatic banner carousels

This has been measured a lot, and automatic carousels decrease conversion rate. The human eye cannot perceive all the information in such a short time, and eventually the information gets blurry. Best suggestion is to try sticky banners or a manual carousel instead. I of course recommend you to test this, but throughout the years, this has been tested a lot and is now considered best practice.

2. Navigation - Add your top categories into the top of the page

This will make it easier for people finding the products that they are looking for and will bring them towards a buying decision faster. Since you provide the visitor with your top categories, the probability is high that they more easily will navigate to the right section.

Buttons can be small and simple, but are important. Visitors want it to be easy to find what they need, it should not always be necessary to navigate through the menu. As an extra add-on you can add quick-links with sub categories in the top of your product listing pages, as a quick filter solution. Best practice is to expose the categories or brands that brings you the most transactions/revenue, but you can always use a formula to calculate it towards your most important goal.

3. Product listing page - Products showing per row

Try to elaborate on the amount of products you're exposing to your visitor on each row in the product listing. Some e-commerce businesses show way to few, and customer experience will suffer since it will increase the amount of scrolling. Showing more products on each row will in most cases simplify for the customer to find the right product easier, both on mobile and desktop. Within the A/B-test you should ellaborate with 3-4 on desktop and 2-3 on mobile.

4. Product detail page - Price communication

We are all aware of the power of price communication. You shouldn't be ashamed to try different setups within this area. If you run a campaign, make sure you communicate the discount in percent. You can also on top of that communicate how much the customer actually save on the discount. These are really basic things, but we actually see some big player's out there missing out on this.

5. Ratings - Collect, show and take advantage of them

Ratings we all know are beneficial to create and enhance credibility online. With a high score you will be able to build trust and transparency towards new visitors, and in the end, increase your CR and customer retention. But another important aspect is how you actually expose them to your audience. One of my advices here is to communicate your score and ratings throughout the whole customer journey - do not only show them in your header or footer - elaborate on communicate them on the PDP and PLP, in the cart, checkout, order confirmation as well as shipping confirmation. Become top of mind as a high rate company and remind the customer that they made the right decision.

Would you like to get ideas on how to increase your CR?

Even if these 5 things are really important, they are also quite basics in today’s online landscape. Even so, we see businesses everyday not optimizing their website to best practise, and depending on your business and business goals, you really need to be creative when deciding on what tests you would like to run.

There are tons of tests you could do. If you are looking to discuss this, and find ways on your website that could decrease your costs, increase your revenue, CR or AoV, you are very much welcome to reach out to me or one of my colleagues and we can grab a digital coffee or lunch in Stockholm to discuss the topic in depth.

Article written by Rickard la Fleur
rickard@beyondretail.se