For the last couple of months there has been a frenzy here in our web marketing department about A/B testing and Conversion Rates. Why the frenzy? Basically because all elements came into place: we developed a high performance A/B testing module within the eCommerce platform, we finished rolling out Omniture Site Catalyst on the shopping carts and we improved the template editing areas for all the accounts so it’s easier than ever to start testing templates.
We have finished quite some tests so far, some with better results than others, so we are pretty confident on making some bold statements on the 3 factors that impact conversion rate in our experiences.
Do you have quality traffic?
Among our clients we have vendors who have chosen to use the default and still have very high funnel conversion rates (more than 60% of the visitors entering the cart finish a transaction) and some with highly customized shopping carts that don’t even come close to 1% funnel conversion rate. Yes, the main factor that impacts the conversion rate is the quality of traffic.
When sending the visitor from your website or software product to the shopping cart make sure this is what he expects. Even better, let him know that he is going to be taken to a third party shopping cart on a secure environment. Maybe they would buy your product, but trying to force them to do it will most likely get them away from your website. So quality traffic means visitors that when getting to the shopping cart this is where they expect to be (they know the price, selected products, and additional options are not pre-selected).
Forcing users to the shopping cart just ain’t the right strategy. Most of them don’t return to your website but rather exit for good and you lose any chance in persuading them to engage with your website or your products.
Customized beats default
We’ve been working hard on making improvements to the default shopping cart provided by Avangate and we are continuously getting stuff rolled out in order to increase the conversion rate. Whenever we did an A/B testing between the default shopping and a customized one, the latter always won by around 2 or 3 percentage points at least. Sometimes all we did was to change the header of the cart and place the client logo and even that did much better than the default shopping cart.
Going deeper into the process got us even better results. The fact is that customizing the cart in a way that the user feels he is still in the same website always rocked the conversion rate. We are dealing with tests on 3 clients right now on which we worked on making the cart as similar to the website as possible and we have great results on all of them. Checkout the before and after for the above cart. Which one do you think is winning?
Well done Cross Selling
Well done cross selling will most likely decrease the conversion rate of a shopping cart. Yeah, you heard me right. However, well done cross selling will increase the average order value, therefore the revenue. Checkout the following charts and see how cross selling has impacted the sales of one of our clients.
What do I mean when I say well done cross selling? Check out the following implementations for 2 other clients of ours.
We will keep you posted with future developments, but till then I would appreciate if you would let us know what your testing ideas are.
