There’s no standard rule that determines which element of your online shop should be tested first. Each eCommerce retailer should perform some preliminary analyses to figure out which elements of their sites have the greatest potential for optimisation. In general, it’s a good idea to use split tests on the following elements, which are all known to have a strong impact on conversion:

• Headings: Whether short and to the point, or long and detailed

• Images: Size, position, style, number, background images or galleries

• Selling points: A neutral list of product functions or a list of key advantages for the customer

• Price: Visible discounts, sale dates and shipping costs

• Payment: Selection of payment methods, length of the payment process

• Forms: Position, wording, design, optional fields, sequence of fields

If your analyses lead you to examine multiple relevant changes at once, the following tips can help you perform your first A/B tests.

Recurring elements on your site

On any website, there will be some elements that recur on nearly every page, such as these:

• Header

• Footer

• Site navigation

• Search bar

• Chat

• Sale banner

The table below shows some possible A/B testing tools to use on your online shop:

Start page

The start page is generally the first page of your website that users will see. To make sure that the customer journey doesn’t end here, it’s important that customers immediately feel welcome.

• They should feel certain that this site is the right place for them to be.

• And they should feel enticed to continue on to viewing other pages on your site.

You can increase page view times by including visual elements, especially photos, graphics and special offers. Performing A/B tests on your start page helps you figure out which images have the greatest impact on your target groups. One option is to use the gaze-cueing effect: visitors to your site naturally tend to look in the same direction as the people pictured on your site are looking. This helps you to direct the visitor’s attention to important elements on the page.

Category page

A category page in an online shop provides an overview of the types of products you offer. Here, your shoppers can filter and arrange the products as they wish. An A/B test helps you check whether your target groups have any specific preferences when it comes to how you list the products; for example, do they prefer to see products in a grid with three columns or five?

In general, you should allow your visitors to sort products in various orders, like these:

• Newest items first

• Best-selling items first

• Lowest/highest price first

It’s important to remember the ‘anchor effect’. This means that visitors are influenced by the first price that they notice on your site. They’ll always instinctively compare all the other prices they see on your site with the first one that they saw. So, choose a higher-priced item as the first one your visitors will see (for example, by using ‘Best result’ or ‘Recommended’ as the default setting for how the items are sorted). A/B testing reveals how various factors influence conversion in your online shop.

1. If your customers see a higher-priced item first and then notice that the next ones are lower in price, they will perceive these latter items to be a better bargain. This makes them more likely to place an order.

2. However, in some industries, showing a higher price at the beginning of the customer journey can have the opposite effect: it can scare potential customers away, which results in a higher bounce rate.

Product pages

Product pages contain all the important information about the product:

• Product name

• Product images

• Description of features, materials, etc.

• Price

The goal of these pages is to entice your customers to make a purchase. This table shows how to improve your product pages using A/B testing (scroll to the right to see the full table):

Checkout

If a visitor makes it to checkout, they’re just a few clicks away from completing an order. To prevent them from clicking away from your shop, use A/B testing to make sure your checkout process is as smoothly designed as possible. Some important topics for A/B testing during checkout are:

• Voucher code fields: Some shops display their voucher code fields more prominently than others during checkout. If users have to hunt too long to find the voucher code field, they may become annoyed and leave your site. In other cases, if a user sees a voucher code field prominently displayed, it might encourage them to navigate away from your site to search for discount codes. And if they can’t find any codes, they may not return to complete the purchase.

• Trust: If a potential customer loses trust in your shop during the checkout process, they will most likely leave without completing a purchase. That’s why it’s important to include elements that build trust, such as seals of approval, transparent shipping prices and returns information. You can use A/B testing to determine the ideal size, position and sequence to use for displaying items like these. 

• Forms: You can test checkout forms to ensure that they are user friendly and not too long. If it takes too long to fill out a form, or if the form requires information that isn’t easy to answer, the user may become frustrated and leave. Try testing to see whether one-page checkout is more effective than multi-page checkout, or whether your customers prefer using auto-fill to fill out forms.