If You Must Tweak Your Way to E-Commerce Success, Then Pay Attention to These Two Steps
You should take care of that before tackling more targeted goals like increasing conversion rates on product pages. If you take care of the worst issues first, once you do get to your detail pages, your changes will have more of an impact.
2. Know and understand your constants. I'm a big believer in a testing culture; what I'm not a big fan of is outsourcing your decision making solely to tests, or the spaghetti-on-the-wall, spray-and-pray mentality that some testers see as a step forward. It's not. It's a giant leap back to the wild, wild, west era of the web.
After you've run your usability test, and as soon as you're ready to prepare your challenger page or pages, what you need to do is think about the options you have for your e-commerce pages:
- If you have enough user reviews (no one likes to be the one starting the slow clap), how much the reviews are emphasized should be part of the test. Make sure you follow general user review guidelines.
- You need to display either the number of stock left or the promo expiration if those are in your toolbox. The fear of missing out should be part of the test — if you're technologically capable of it. What you'll be testing is how emphasized those items are.
- You should have no tests in which the call to action (CTA) is a de-emphasized part of the page. You still need to follow general CTA guidelines as you're testing.
- You should provide shipping details and still follow best practices in that area.
You're not losing any creative freedom while running your tests by ensuring they have the necessary elements. Split or multivariant tests are about getting different good pages in front of people, and seeing which ones are great at conversion. They're not about throwing all ideas at users to see which ones make sense. They don't give you any excuses not to do your research first.
Tim Ash is the author of the bestselling book Landing Page Optimization, and CEO of SiteTuners. A computer scientist and cognitive scientist by education (his PhD studies were in Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence), Tim has developed an expertise in user-centered design, persuasion and understanding online behavior, and landing page testing. In the mid-1990s he became one of the early pioneers in the discipline of website conversion rate optimization. Over the past 15 years, Tim has helped a number of major US and international brands to develop successful web-based initiatives. Companies like Google, Expedia, Kodak, eHarmony, Facebook, American Express, Canon, Nestle, Symantec, Intuit, AutoDesk and many others have benefitted from Tim's deep understanding and innovative perspective.
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