The fate of your online business depends upon the usability of your website. Reputed e-commerce companies regularly check their sites and improve different elements to offer a hassle-free shopping experience. Whenever you see any drop in sales figures, try A/B testing and find out the weak elements in your e-commerce site.
Some e-commerce site owners think attractive e-commerce web design is good enough to attract consumers. What they don’t realize is that customers visit an online store for shopping convenience, not aesthetic beauty. From shopping cart solutions to search results, everything is important in an e-commerce website, even some minor mistakes can spoil customer experience. Therefore, you should test your website at least once in a month and evaluate its performance.
Instead of testing only a few elements, you should check the entire site thoroughly for better understanding. Test results will help you increase the conversion rate in the future.
Here is a list of the elements you should check in A/B testing.
- Product Descriptions. Product description plays a very important role in the buying process. If your product description does not convince the customers, they won’t click on the “add to cart” button. Read the description of less selling products carefully and find out a way to improve it.
- Sign Up Page Headline. Web users hate to fill sign up forms. Hence, your sign up page headline should give them a reason to subscribe and convince them that the process is very simple. Once I saw a sign up form that says, “the record for filling out this form is 15 seconds… your time starts now!”. Never write such headlines. It will pressurize your customers and they will make mistakes.
- Purchase Button. Purchase button is the most essential part of an e-commerce site. Design of the purchase button and call-to-action message can affect shopping process. Hence, you should test the color, size and text of the “buy” button. The size of your buy button should be large enough so that visitors can spot it immediately. Ideal size of a buy button is 230px by 45px. Place the buy button above the fold area to grab users’ attention. Lastly, modify the call-to-action message according to the target consumers. For instance, Amazon UK site shows “add to basket” message on the buy button and Amazon USA site shows “add to cart” message to communicate with the customers seamlessly.
- Pricing Strategies. You must motivate your customers to buy products from your site and the best way to do so is by modifying your pricing technique. Try to understand your customers’ psychology and think of an intelligent pricing strategy. For instance, you may sell an item for $200, but what if you start selling the same item at $199.99? The price of your product remains almost same, but it looks cheaper to the buyer.
- Product Display and Search Results. Test the order of search results and product display. Besides A/B testing, you can also use Google Analytics to get convincing data. How many products do you want to show on the homepage? Too many products can confuse buyers. Hence, show only the most popular products on the homepage and sort the search results using “popularity”, “price” and “most discounted” categories.
A/B testing helps you determine the shortcomings of your e-commerce site. If you think that there are some major problems with your website design and shopping cart, redesign the site and hire a professional web development company for customized shopping cart development.
About the Author
Hema Gupta is a social media analyst and marketer at Webguru, India. She is always active in the web world, scanning the social media sites to keep herself updated about the changing behavior of the web, and grabbing the hottest news. Her habitual pastime is social engagement. She also has great interest and creativity on website design and graphic designing.
