Did you know that Amazon was able to boost their annual profits by tens of millions of dollars just by moving credit card offers from the home page to the shopping cart page? It’s amazing how this one simple tweak brought them such a large increase in sales.
So, how could you harness the power of small changes to achieve similar results for your high-volume Shopify store?
Using the strategy of A/B testing for your e-commerce platform might just be the powerhouse technique you’ve been searching for. A/B testing can allow you to compare two versions of a webpage to see which performs better. It’s all about making conscious yet minor changes to user experiences, measuring the impact, and learning which adjustments bring about richer results.
Because high-volume merchants deal with large audiences, being able to pinpoint the preferences, behaviors, and shopping habits of different segments could help you optimize your sales funnel. With feature-rich Shopify A/B testing tools you could optimize every aspect of your website for growth.
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In ecommerce, every click and scroll matters – just one action can reveal a ton of information about what your customers want and how they interact with your website. A/B testing can provide a wealth of insights into customer behavior and what works best for your target audience so you can refine your ecommerce strategy. Here are some of the core reasons why A/B testing matters.
Arguably, the most compelling reason why A/B testing matters is its high potential to maximize ROI and revenue. After all, the core purpose of these testing processes is to let you fine-tune your website and increase the efficiency of your site and your marketing campaigns.
Imagine if you’re investing a significant amount in pay-per-click (PPC) ads to drive traffic to your Shopify store. You’d likely want to make sure that every single paid visitor has an optimal chance of converting into a customer, right? A/B testing helps do this by identifying and deploying marketing copy and elements that resonate best with your target audience. And, of course, the higher the efficiency, the higher your ROI.
In the same vein, A/B testing also has a powerful impact on your overall revenue. If we look at the role of conversion rates, for example, we can see that even the smallest increase can have a profound effect on your sales.
But let’s take a closer look at how that works. If you’re a high-volume merchant doing $10 million in sales annually and have a solid conversion rate of around 2%, A/B testing has the potential to drive that increase by a simple 5 – 10%.
Maybe you’re thinking – a 5% increase on 2%? Why would I want to put in the effort for a 0.1% bump? If you apply that minuscule increase to your $10 million in sales, it boils down to an extra $100,000 to your bottom line – which means $200,000 in added revenue if you reach that 10% increase. Even better, these modest increases are just a taste of what perfectly executed A/B testing can do for business.
Beyond the financial impacts, one potentially less tangible but equally important aspect that A/B testing influences is the entire customer experience. For as long as we can remember, the customer experience has determined whether someone is simply a one-time customer or a loyal, long-term patron. With ecommerce, this hasn’t changed.
Introducing new designs, product placements, and features on your site, can either enhance or disrupt your customers’ journey on your website. So, how do you make sure that these changes result in a positive impact? That’s right – using A/B testing to launch and test them.
Say your design team has come up with a new design or feature on your website that everyone seems to love and agree on. While it might seem like a fantastic addition, there’s really only one way to confirm that speculation, and that’s by testing it on your actual audience.
An advantage of A/B testing is that you can roll out new images, copy or designs to a small portion of your visitors to determine if the changes were positive, limiting the risk of lost sales or providing a poor customer experience.
These tests can be anything from headline copy changes to recommended product placements – the end goal is to provide an incredible customer experience. The process isn’t linear either, which means you should continue to tailor and improve your site to provide an increasingly better experience to your customers as time goes on. Customers will eventually start to see your ecommerce store as personal, engaging, and user-friendly, and you’ll solidify yourself as a competitor in the space.
When you’re managing a high-volume Shopify store, every detail impacts the customer experience and your total sales. But understanding exactly which details you should be looking at can certainly be a challenge. A/B testing platforms work to make this process much less overwhelming, giving you clear insights and data to inform your decision-making. Not all software is built the same, though, which is why you’ll want to look for ones with the following features.
Split testing is another interchangeable term for A/B testing. This main capability is something you’ll need in order to create and compare multiple versions of your product pages, button placements, CTAs, and more. These variations can directly influence how your customers interact and perceive the items you offer, as well as your brand. With split testing, you can easily figure out the optimal look and feel of your product pages to maximize appeal and conversion.
If we consider the ‘Add to Cart’ buttons, for example, subtle changes in color, size, wording, or placement can have a dramatic effect on click-through rates – and the right app should make it easy to experiment with these types of elements.
Advanced analytics also sits at the top of the list. Beyond simple metrics like clicks and conversions, this feature lets you dive even deeper into understanding customer behavior. That’s because they provide a detailed understanding and overview of which aspects of your website are working and which need a little more work.
Top A/B testing software offers insights on important ecommerce metrics like conversions, traffic metrics, bounce rates, duration of visits, and others. These metrics help you identify which variants convert more customers and lead to higher engagement.
The right Shopify split testing tool should integrate seamlessly with your Shopify store and its theme. It also shouldn’t require tons of upfront legwork or development time to get it up and running. It’s important that you use an app that lets you quickly set up your tests without a complicated implementation process.
For times when your Shopify store is buzzing with high volumes of traffic, sometimes A/B testing might not make the cut. For more complicated experiments that involve a range of variables, you’d need the features offered by multivariate testing.
Unlike A/B testing, which changes one element at a time for a focused comparison, multivariate testing lets you change multiple elements on a single webpage at the same time. This means you’re looking at how combinations of changes in different aspects of your page interact and how they influence user behavior as a collective.
A/B testing apps that include this useful feature give you the opportunity to perform advanced-level experimentation. Maybe a new header isn’t making as much of a difference on its own as you expected, but when combined with a different layout or color scheme, it could seriously increase engagements or conversions.
Along with providing all these testing options, there should also be the ability to control experiment exposure. Essentially, while you’re testing several elements on your site, you don’t necessarily want all your customers to experience these changes right away.
Especially if a change you’re testing doesn’t resonate with your audience for some reason, only a fraction of your customers will have experienced it, cushioning your store against negative results. For high-volume stores, having this level of control is extra important considering the downsides to large-scale exposure.
Some A/B testing apps will also offer the capability to change and customize your website’s visual components without the need for any coding knowledge. It’ll provide a visual interface that will let you create different versions of your test variants, whether it’s to do with forms, buttons, text, colors, or layouts – simply with a few clicks or drags.
The ‘advanced’ aspect means that you can make complex edits as well, even ones that would typically require developer expertise, such as HTML, JavaScript, and more. You and your non-technical team members can adjust the visual appeal of your site, which can speed up your testing timeline and give you more control over the process. And who doesn’t want to see improvements in performance quickly?
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Now that you know why A/B testing is so important for your Shopify store and the features you should be looking for in an app, we’ll go over four stand-out apps designed to meet the needs of high-volume merchants.
Shogun is a powerful platform that comes with an extensive range of optimization, personalization, and visual merchandising tools – all for the purpose of delivering high-end ecommerce experiences. Its visual-first approach allows merchants to build high-converting web pages without having to code.
Shoplift is another platform made for building and testing high-performing web pages on Shopify. It’s best known for its flexible customization options and its full integration with Shopify. The software makes it easy to create pages that align with your brand’s visual identity and theme and execute tests based on millions of data points. There’s even what’s called ‘Lift Assist,’ which provides blocks and sections like sticky carts and inventory indicators automatically styled to match your brand.
While Shoplift clearly offers impressive features as well, what sets Shogun and Shoplift apart is Shogun’s advanced Visual Editor allowing you to build rich landing pages and variants. This makes it a potentially quicker option for those looking to build a page from scratch. Shogun also offers multivariate testing, making the optimization process even more efficient.
Intelligems is an A/B testing and CRO (conversion rate optimization) tool created specifically for Shopify. Its AI-powered testing capabilities, along with different forms of testing (think content, shipping prices, and product prices), let store owners test just about anything with the goal of improving conversion rates. With segmentation features, Intelligems can provide more precision in their experiments and personalized strategies.
While both platforms offer invaluable features, they shine in their own corners. Shogun excels in page-building functionality with its advanced visual editor. It offers more control over the visual aspects of your store and allows you to test and optimize more aspects of the customer shopping experience. Intellgems, on the other hand, leans heavily into optimizing product pricing and content strategies using AI.
OptiMonk is an innovative conversion optimization and on-site popup tool. Their toolkit extends beyond traditional A/B testing capabilities, focusing on enhancing customer interaction through targeted on-site messaging and personalization. This platform has a broader approach to personalization and solutions for everything from increasing sales to boosting pay-per-click (PPC).
Unlike Shogun, OptiMonk isn’t a specialized A/B testing tool. The app allows ecommerce sellers to deliver personalized messages based on visitors’ behavior to nurture customer engagement and conversions. Shogun’s strength is that it allows you to optimize the entire customer shopping experience through the visual editor, integrated A/B testing and personalized Targeted Experiences.
Investing in A/B testing software can be beneficial for almost every Shopify merchant, but as a high-volume seller it’s important that you’re especially well-informed to ensure you’re reaching your store’s peak performance.
A/B testing lets you operate from a place of insights rather than assumptions, offering the data you need to make informed enhancements and adjustments. The end result? The opportunity to make your store customer-centric and high-converting.
With a treasure trove of tools at your disposal, you have the capability to design, test, and refine every detail of your Shopify store. Once you discover the potential of these A/B testing platforms, you can unlock a whole new level of growth.
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