Crazy Selling Strategies That Actually Work For Ecommerce

ugly converts is what I've learned is some of the ugliest sites I've ever seen where we're like this thing seems straight up broken are the ones that print money to this day the most the highest revenue site I ever worked on was also the ugliest welcome to the my wife Critter job podcast today I'm thrilled to have Kurt elster back on the show he runs ethercycle.com where he helps private label sellers launch their own e-commerce websites he is a Shopify platform expert who helps Shopify users improve their sales and he is also the host of the popular unofficial Shopify podcast so in this episode we're actually going to talk about counter-intuitive learnings that he's made from running split tests on his client's site and when it comes to site design what we expect to happen doesn't always happen and with that welcome to show Kurt it's been a long time thank you for having me you know Kurt it's been a while anything new that's up with you since the last time you were on like what are you working on right now that's exciting now this is kind of interesting I've been doing the same thing roughly for 10 years we were building WordPress sites in 2009 and the only thing that's changed is like we said let's just work exclusively on Shopify and then showed up on your show we started building apps and I've been hosting this podcast the whole time I use my own show just staying the course staying steady has tremendously grown things the big difference now between then and now hey I have better branding and B I've got I have a team now we were able to hire people um full-time and uh part-time this is very helpful it is helpful uh as long as you have good people like we've had a couple disasters over the years uh over here all right so I've been lucky I've only had one disaster so we're talking about split testing today and I have a love-hate relationship with it um so for me and I want you to share your experiences also but for me it takes forever to set up then you got to wait weeks depending on how much traffic you have and then I would say eighty percent of the time the data is inconclusive so it's not satisfying I know you work with a lot of companies and I'm glad you got a lot of successful tests to share with us so I want to start actually with what your best practices are and what your kind of success rate is for a split test okay well so you're right uh your experience is is accurate a lot of people have that experience and I was resistant to split testing I loved conversion rate optimization but my experience was like yours and so I was instead leaning on usability like let's do user testing let's look at heat Maps let's do surveys let's talk to people and then let's and look at our analytics and then try and infer update and then go back and check and that process works but over time you know I started to get a few clients where they had the order velocity where I could run tests and have statistically significant results in two weeks and the other big change was Google optimize like in the past you had to mess with these tools that were tough that were like really very Enterprise tools visual website Optimizer optimizely okay I'm sorry I threw them under the bus they're perfectly good tools they're also they are not necessarily for mere mortals and whereas and they're expensive Google optimize is free it is as easy to use as a Google product is which you know all right it's not like perfect but it's definitely easier than those other two and a lot of the the barriers to entry that you described went away for me around two years ago and it's all right I'm gonna figure this out I'm gonna get good at this I know enough to get started and be dangerous and so I started playing with it and then I started having the experience you did where like most the time the Tesco's who cares you know what that's a perfectly acceptable answer in which case you can go you know what it's preference then I could decide what to do with this but what I learned was sometimes it's because you have the wrong metric chosen for the test and so it's nice and optimized you can run multiple objectives like it doesn't have to be conversion rate which they call transactions it could be Revenue which that's going to include average order value it could be page view like are we just getting them to the next page that suddenly now you can get more significant results more often and the other thing I learned was you know the classic split test that we think about is oh what color should the buttons be what is my end call it and like of course that's not a great test and you end up with that experience where it's like it nothing mattered what works better is sometimes you just go I'm going to try an entirely different template I'm going to change 10 things about this page which of these two versions works better and as long as like there's a hypothesis behind it it's like a goal like does a cleaner version of this work better does a more detailed version of this work better and they've got you know five to ten changes between them ah now I'm going to start to see those bigger differences where it's like yeah this one is 95 likely to be better all right so let me ask you this then how much traffic and conversions do you need to to run a split test within a reasonable amount of time oh that's a really good question you need to be getting dozens a day hold on let what's that's not that much actually okay well I'm gonna look up a store right now okay I'm gonna log into a store maybe we have to edit out me waiting yeah no that's cool uh well so while you're looking that up so so my store gets a lot more than that but I still found it took a couple weeks to before like the tool would tell me like I got a semi-conclusive result or the tool told me to just stop the test because it wasn't going anywhere um sometimes it drags yeah I think dozens is the minimum okay once you're at like a hundred a day maybe 150 a day totally fine you're good to go this is you're gonna be able to run a test now the catch is even if you can hit statistical significance quickly you do realistically need to be running it for 14 days to see a not skewed result and like here an example as to why is people get paid typically get paid every other Friday and so you want that like full pay cycle in there and so two weeks really tends to be the minimum for this we can think of this as uh somewhat accurate a proper data-driven decision okay that makes sense because I remember uh the first time when I didn't know what I was doing and arguably I still don't know what I'm doing but I would get like a like a significant result within like the first couple days and just want to just call the test right away yeah yeah I'll see that on Twitter like I followed a guy who claimed to be like a stats guy like a finance econ guy who knew stats who like had gone to Ecom and he was calling tests in two three days so I knew right away I'm like ah this is this isn't significant this isn't right and this guy's full of it like that's just one of those real easy early mistakes and I did it too the second question I want to ask you is what like can you just kind of describe for the listeners how easy it is to set up now you mentioned uh Google is easy to set up what can you just kind of describe what's involved at a high level okay so you probably already run Google analytics on your site and because you're already running Google analytics on your site it has most of the data it needs the part it's missing is being able to modify the site so Google optimize links to your Google analytics account now it's got all the data it needs but it needs to be able to tweak the site it's got a single piece of JavaScript that it'll give you that it says put this just on every page so you drop it in the head of the site boom you're good to go and that's even like the simplified non-google tag manager version of this if you're using GTM by that point you can already figure this out and Google has in optimize it'll be like hey did you want us to verify the tool is there and everything's working correctly like it will really try to save you from yourself and then after it's interested in all your site you just need to tell it which Pages you want to test or so then you want to set up a test right and that part all right until you have successfully done it the first time can feel intimidating I watched a few YouTube screencasts to figure it out and played with it and once I had done it a couple times I was like okay I know enough to be dangerous I could figure this out or it's like you're gonna do just the a standard it'll give you like several options for test you want the first one just says a b and then you've got variant a is the original unchanged site variant B we don't want to add multiple variants because now we need even more traffic yeah variant B is we're going to modify that site and Google optimize gives you a visual editor where you could just like click the elements on your site remove them that's often a really like where we start with testing it's just like let's just start pulling stuff out and see if it was helping or hurting and you remove elements or like text you can rename or if you know enough to be dangerous dangerous with CSS you could just have it inject your own written CSS code and it'll just restyle you know however however talented you may be so let me ask you this does testing on mobile throw a wrench into this because you got responsive so does are you split testing the mobile site and the desktop site or do you do those separately all right this is another good question com brings into segmentation so if I really hey I want to make sure either I want to make sure that my test makes sense on mobile and desktop because realistically on my website I'm getting people on mobile and desktop and it's probably like an e-commerce that's probably 90 10 split yeah 80 20 occasionally happens but that's rare like ideally the test makes sense on both like if you're just changing labels changing colors it'll work on both but you can segment it if it doesn't you could segment to Mobile versus desktop like this exactly what you do do you have a separate test just for mobile and a separate test for desktop because they are different even if like because the design is so different even changing like removing an element will make a big difference on one and maybe not the other right yeah yes absolutely and with with weird unexpected results I'll do that and so like one test that really surprised me is I'd like on the the category pages of your site you've got your category title do you have like a really cool lifestyle hero image up there I do not actually okay well a lot it's not uncommon and I like those you know I I used to be a photographer I like that I like the fancy stuff I like the aesthetic I ran a split test where I got rid of that hero image on an apparel site with that's like style that is driven by lifestyle and aesthetic and the site performs better without the hero image and that was just on everyone and I thought all right maybe it's like it's because it's Mobile versus desktop so I ran it as a mobile same test you could duplicate it and go all right I only want to show this to mobile and I only want to show this to desktop same result it improves it on both but I in addition to Mobile versus desktop the other segmentation we need to think about is new versus returning and so you can do that too and so I did not often but a few times I found like where you had a mixed result on a test when you run it again as Mobile versus desktop or new versus returning you'll find oh this helps new visitors or this Hertz returning visitors and so then what's cool in Google optimize you can actually deploy these things rather than like go commit them to the website you can have Google optimize run that test as what they call a personalization which is really just like it's an ongoing test without reporting interesting okay and that's just built into it and again this thing I know there's a paid version of it I've never had to use it it it has always just worked with what I wanted to do in the free plan what's so nice about this is It's integrated into analytics so they have all the data already whereas in the past it was a pain in the butt yeah you could go through like adding this whole extra layer onto the site just to support split testing and it just isn't the case anymore let's just talk about that test that you just talked about like it's it's generally best practice to just have your products right there above the fold and not have the hero image I had pains when I was designing my category sites because I want to include content for SEO and I found that it was just kind of pushing things down so what I did was I moved it underneath the products and that was my solution I had a little blurb at the top but so it's it's good to know that approach that's often what we do for exactly the same reasons but it's good to know that you actually tested that hypothesis so no hero image products above the fold as high as possible is what converts the best yes and so this one uh could translate into a best practice or truism I think so it turns out the fold is real and at least as far as it affects your revenue and so getting the products in front of the person as quickly as possible really tends to be a positive across the board by the way for you content creators out there this holds true for blogs as well like if your post is about like the top 17 ways to optimize your site you want to put like the top 17 ways above the fold if you can some people don't even they look at the internet and they go this is just junk I'm not looking for this and then they bounce but I never split tested anymore that's just best practice you could you could split test that the way you do it like you you'd publish the blog with the intro that you like and then you could use Google optimized either like hide that first paragraph or rewrite it I like that actually that'd be so easy if you have a high traffic blog actually you probably get results right away now the question is like what's the what's the goal and so Google optimize you can you can attach to bounce rate you can tie to page views you could tie it to like if you have subscriptions set up as a goal you could do that I love it I love it there was uh one thing that we were talking about or that you sent me earlier about category Pages removing prices of the products I'm very curious about that that experiment because I think I saw it on the e-commerce field forums there's a big discussion about that and I think the consensus on the Forum was remove prices on the category pages to get people to browse products more what did you find with your experiment all right this one is a must test in some stores this will absolutely help you in other stores it will absolutely hurt you and then I think the other thing to consider here is like does the store have quick view and that I have not gotten into yet but I know like this one if you could support it absolutely try this and test it I suspect what's going on here is pricing psychology when I see that product in the collection grid I see the product I see the title I've got context in my head whether I think about it or not I have attached a potential price to it and as soon as I click through and I end up whether that's like a quick view pop-up or I'm on the product page now I see the price I suspect what's going on here is if that price is consistently above what the person expected that's going to hurt conversion if it's below what they expect it'll help conversion so so much of this is about quality of traffic and presentation and I think that's why it's a must test interesting so in your case when putting the prices on was better what was the price point of that product I all of these tests we did for uh apparel stores was always under a hundred under 100 so not high end then okay this was not not premium I think this is so dependent on audience and product so what was the sorry what was the result of that test in this one case the test ended up uh improving conversions and average order value so we gained Revenue by not showing collection or not showing prices on collection or category Pages interesting you know um so I was buying a gift from my wife on I think it was the Tiffany's website they hide all prices I was just listening to your hypothesis now because if it's if it comes in higher like every time I clicked on one of those Tiffany's jewelry pieces it came out higher than it was expensive I bet I did they have a strong brand so maybe maybe that's it and they just want to hide the prices to drive people off the site right away because I would have been probably driven away yeah that's yeah because there's that click debt like you have clicked through you're more committed I think that correlates like page views and conversion I believe they correlate like when you can really get people to spend time on the site I think they spend more money supposedly Ikea subscribes to this Theory that's why those places are like labyrinths I actually have a question for you I don't know if you tested this but it's generally best practice if you display the price to list the products from expensive to least expensive as opposed to the other way around I like the theory here the theory being like you set the peak price first that's the first thing they see now everything else seems cheaper as a result as opposed if I flipped it the other way I have not tested it but testing collection sort order is a really good idea I'm writing that down okay I'll just tell you the theory for everyone listening the theory is they see the most expensive item first that anchors the price so they psychologically are willing to spend more or expect higher prices and then when they scroll down and see everything else is cheaper they're like oh okay this isn't that bad that first product was expensive so and these are much cheaper that's a theory at least I don't know what it is in practice well I'm gonna I'm gonna test it on on an apparel store we'll see what happens yeah okay so what else you got Kurt that's counterintuitive font size how important is font size all right I'll just give you an experience from my store it it's huge for our store because we cater to a lot of people over the age of 55 who are far-sighted and we didn't do a split test for this but we had lots of people complain via email that the writing was too small and and they would just call their order in and we didn't want people calling us because that takes a lot of time so we literally made the fonts pretty big Mobile on mobile and desktop kind of actually mostly mobile I should say mostly mobile across the board and then those calls stopped hmm all right I like this so I know the truism here the best practice is and easier to read site performs better people do not are not going to tolerate your shenanigans with your like light gray font on a dark gray background right they're just not into it a little tiny font you're like it looks so sophisticated and subtle no it looks hard to read and so they're just gonna go to another site that is easy to read and so I knew anytime we make the site user to read it performs better but I said let's you know let's let's test this let's get the data let's prove it and so I tried split testing just font size and results are like totally inconclusive all over the place and what it turned out is it's not just font size it's more than that it is about like total readability and so baymard put together Bay Marge usability Institute has readability guidelines that they figured out that they recommend and they're like really the thing that matters is line length and if you've ever read a newspaper or magazine they have those real narrow columns yeah you never think twice about it because it's easy to read and it makes sense and so that's actually the thing you're looking for and so if you have a clever developer they can set this up for you so like the site's responsive and those columns are always 60 to 80 characters and then you want to make sure you have a nice line height between them and that really will make the site much easier to read when you implement like those quality readability guidelines versus a site that maybe like had full width and Tiny fonts and low contrast of course absolutely it's going to perform better for the reasons you described was it's easy to read people are going to quit complaining about it interesting so when you did your test the results were inconclusive and then you this this other study wasn't your study right this was baymart once we when we when I did the test again as are are just our previous font which is like you know whatever it was okay um versus like the full baymard readability guidelines the thing that changed was bounce rate bounce rate went down that makes sense you know what what's funny Kurt uh I know you have a couple more tests to talk about here but what are some of the best things to test and what are some of the worst things to test since you've been doing this for a while the worst things to test are like subjective styling and that's where a lot of people start I think the best things to test really are content like every element on the page should ideally be serving a purpose and if it's not why is it there it's just getting in the way and split testing often reveals that in Stark data so I oftentimes like phase one is use it as a way to clean up the site without being emotional about it like a website is our baby right and there are reasons that we did it the way we did it but when you have the data going well here's what it costs you to have these trust badges jammed in right here suddenly the trust badges seem less attractive it's interesting I I had a friend who was split testing his landing page which gets like hundreds of sign ups per day and he had this landing page where he's explaining it was a lead magnet landing page where he explained exactly what people got with that lead magnet and he was testing it against this one where literally a sentence I will teach you this email form and that one performed way better than the one where you actually explain what you get which kind of blew my mind and it was ugly so he's he's to this day he still uses the ugly landing page form just doesn't make sense ugly converts is what I've learned is some of the ugliest sites I've ever seen where we're like this thing seemed straight up broken are the ones that print money to this day the most the highest revenue side I ever worked on was also the ugliest really yeah I don't know what the deal is and and highest converting by what metric like compared to just the highest converting it was highest revenue it remains is the highest revenue and I've since then I've seen other beautiful sites that are high Revenue but that one stuck with me and that I know good design is not a requirement of high Revenue sure I mean I got a story to tell here a long time ago I had my set over bumblebee Linens have left side navigation and I was in this Mastermind group where literally everyone there said your site is heinous you need to be redesigned and I ended up redesigning the entire site problem is I changed like 20 different things but it ended up converting like almost 50 percent better so so when you're talking to someone about split testing do you recommend changing one thing at a time or just making like a big change in testing it all at once like how have you been conducting your experiments when you test one thing at a time you it's way more often that you end up with the inconclusive results test doing like oh we changed this entire site that's not that useful focusing on like I think the the middle ground the thing where like you'll see the fastest most consistent results where it's easy to wrap your head around it where it's just more practical is redesign a template at a time like this is we're gonna we know the cart page is this bottleneck you know because we could see like how many people viewed a product how many added a cart how many reach check out maybe we know the cart pages are bottleneck all right so let's in come up with a theory and make three different versions of that cart template and now we're gonna test systematically test those against the original and see all right which one performs the best all right let's Implement that that seems to be a better approach and when you have multiple versions of entirely different pages yeah you don't know what the individual thing is that perform better but as you're iterating through tests you start a picture starts to emerge of this is what my audience likes and that's I think one of the other like real learnings I've discovered here is it really comes down to well what does this audience expect what do they want what do they prefer and it often does not have anything to do with what you as the brand owner what like design trends like what everybody else likes it's the people who you're asking to open their wallet is their opinion is what matters you know what's funny is I used to be really into split testing or not not doing them but actually just reading up on them and I remember there was some statistic like I can't remember the exact percentage that I don't want to screw it up but the majority of the successful split tests are when you remove stuff from your page yes not add to it because ultimately every page should just have one goal where you want people to go and the more things you have people look at the less likely they're going to do the one thing that you want at least that's the theory I agree with that yeah so I'm curious what other split tests do you have to share uh I think the other one that's worth looking at again with new eyes is free shipping I'm no longer convinced that we have to have free shipping really okay there's always there's been this idea that the number one unexpected there are unexpected shipping expenses the number one conversion killer in checkouts I don't think it's true anymore so you could depending on the platform there are ways to split test shipping results or shipping rates so for us it's like is you have to be on Shopify plus and there's a couple apps that telegems or ship Scouts so that's what we're using specifically I don't know how to do it with shopifying Google optimize and with these apps you can we can offer different shipping rates and they'll have an announcement bar on the site itself so like before they hit checkout they've seen what the free shipping threshold is and it'll tell you like this is the conversion rate with these different uh checkout thresholds and if you give it the like your average cost of goods sold and your average shipping expense per uh package it'll also figure out profit per visitor and once you start doing that suddenly you discover oftentimes offering no free shipping at all is ends up being way more profitable overall and the impact on checkout conversion with different thresholds is significantly smaller than you'd think all right give me some numbers here I'm fascinated by this all right so we tried this in a store and I've run this test now in in four separate stores and we've gotten similar results every time let's say no free shipping this is checkout conversion rate no free shipping will be about 70 percent free shipping at 25 at checkout they're gonna convert closer to 80 percent and then at 75 free shipping threshold they convert at 75 percent okay so that's in line with what you would expect right yeah and so 75 is like the ideal balance but really what matters is profit and so at profit like for this particular store their fulfillment cost was 750 in order I don't know where that falls in with yours you know fulfillment costs are all over the place depending on however goods are yep but like for this particular store uh the 25 free shipping threshold profit per visitor 13 bucks the profit per visitor at 75 16.50 profit per visitor with no free shipping 20. so the chances are I probably want to not offer free shipping at all is going to uh result in the highest revenue and profit interesting yeah most people don't think about profit they think about conversion rate I will add a wrinkle to that though because once you get someone to open up their wallet then you can probably sell them a whole bunch of other stuff so maybe it's a little more complicated than that right now yeah I could do cross sells and use free shipping as a nudge what I like about not offering free shipping all the time is that that can then be one of your promotions instead of having to rely on uh discounting or new product development you know yeah you know I agree with you I I hate discounting and whenever I think about discounts I think about Bed Bath and Beyond oh right are they still in business the local one closed like the two bed bath and Beyonds by my house closed because I would never shop there without that 20 coupon I suspect other people were too but uh yeah profit-wise I can definitely see why that's the case we do a shipping threshold and we set it at uh just at threshold where we try to get someone to add in one more item I'm not so what's the best practice then Kurt what do you recommend here well so the issue here is without this like these very specific tools it's really hard to test and even within that like depending on how your your fulfillment is set up testing these can be really hard yeah um so I would still say hey you probably want to offer free shipping I would make that free shipping threshold higher than your average order value would be my my safe starting point um but don't don't sell yourself short and have like an unnecessarily or artificially low free shipping because it's just a tremendous cost center for most people especially shipping is getting expensive it is getting really expensive in fact we had to jack up our shipping rates because yeah it's like a loss leader yeah it's bad now I mean it's going up like all the time before like USPS used to raise their price once a year I feel like it just creeps up like every time I check now so we did uh it was working on a store that had heavy items they ended up being like six pounds shipped and it was glass so you had to like really pack it carefully and it was it was like oh it's shipping you know from from the like Northwest to Wisconsin to the Midwest and it was like I think it was 30 bucks and like the item itself you know with like 40 50 bucks like the shipping was over 50 of the cost it was crazy it was what do you douched I don't know once the item hits a certain weight like there's only so much you could do to minimize shipping costs you know what we've struggled with uh when people need it overnighted it's often really difficult like we have table rate shipping it's often really difficult to predict because it depends on where they are geographically also uh oh you got to get that carrier calculated shipping I don't like that because sometimes it goes down and then you don't get any shipping costs add a buffer to it to make up for that you know how how often it's low and by how much and so add either a percentage or a fixed dollar amount to the carrier calculated rate to try and balance it out yeah yeah I mean there's technical ways to solve this I just haven't expended much brain power on it but uh occasionally it's a problem and I get pissed when it happens let's just say do you have any more split tests to share with us these are really bad evening by the way yeah one uh one last Quick One if you you know uh on Amazon it'll be like uh you recently viewed products yes I think those are those are neat this is a good personalization one we ran this on a for new visitors the your recently viewed items decreased conversions by nine percent for returning visitors increased it by 33. and so this is an example of like wow testing the different audiences and displays can be hugely beneficial because you definitely want that recently viewed items widget and I like to put on the cart page um you definitely want that on the cart page but if they're there a new visitor you actually don't want it if it's a new visitor though they presumably don't even have anything populated there right they won't and then they'll have like you know as soon as they view something it'll show them like the one item is usually how those are set up I see can you explain why you think that's the case no this baffled me but and so I'm like all right we're gonna try this again and so I ran it again and I also did it Mobile versus desktop and the results with this were consistent really I guess it's just more things to click on then right I assume it's it goes it like when you're new it starts as a distraction when you visit the site leave come back a few days later then it's helpful that makes sense I guess because if you leave and you come back you probably already know what you're probably ready to buy or more ready to buy yeah I think I'd sub for most stores on subsequent visits like if you're returning they're you're much more likely to buy than when you're first poking around ah whereas I guess when you're first there you're looking at something and all of a sudden you got like 10 choices you're like forget it I'm not I'm just not buying here anymore oh Choice paralysis is totally real I have not worked out a test for this yet you know I guess I could hide like total number of items displayed but that would be an interesting test it's like let's figure out is paralysis analysis real and I'm convinced it is so one of the things on my list to implement on my site is frequently bought together I'm very curious how that performs because I see it on Amazon generally I get these ideas when I shop on Amazon I go hey that's a nice feature but let me try that which is absolutely the wrong thing to do by the way if anyone's listening like Amazon is not your site obviously but that frequently bought together I always think of ways to just trying to increase the average order value have you ever tested that with any of your sites assuming like the merchandising makes sense it does consistently help to boost average order value and this is another thing with split testing like you really don't necessarily we've implied it here but you don't necessarily want to just strictly have conversion rate or transactions as your goal you can look at Revenue so that includes average order value that could be helpful or a lot of these other items like okay does this decrease bounce rate does this increase page views can I get people on the site longer with this so once you have like Pages instrumented you can literally test all these variables all at once right without any extra work yes I don't know what though there's a limit in Google optimize but you say like this is my primary goal and here are like I could choose secondary goals and I think it's limited at like two or three I forget which um so that's really helpful and then you could run you could run multiple tests at once assuming you have the the order volume to support it but like as you add them it really starts slowing things down because you get you're you're cutting you're dividing up your audience right right you know I have always wanted to know you know that little certain sites have that slide up like when someone buys something it says this person just purchased that oh yeah the the fomo pop-ups the fomo pop-ups I've always been curious whether that increases the conversion rate or not yeah I think that's another one where it it depends on the brand at this point like when they happen I'm so blind to it like I don't even see them anymore yeah and I'm just great I'm like well at least it's not the Spin to Win slide out I almost feel like you have to split test often because things tend to work when they're new but then like you said once people become jaded to something it probably doesn't convert as well anymore 100 yeah what works now may not work in 12 months so what is your strategy then on on keeping this up with your clients are you constantly running a split test yes I wish I had some like formal approach to like all right yeah we implement this and then we're going to set a reminder we're going to revisit this it's more like for the people who are doing split testing with we have regular recurring meetings and it's like we're just always going through kpis so I guess it's data driven and then trying to identify like these are our opportunities and if it comes and if we get to a point where it's like all right well suddenly the cart page is our bottleneck again often I'll revisit tests just to like hey let's just let's verify that it is what our belief is still the case yeah absolutely nothing wrong with like let's run that test again see you know maybe that was a weird outlier so we've presented a number of tests to the listeners let's say you're just starting out and you want to try this what is like some low-hanging food that you should test for sure I would you're going to look at like what are the Prime pages here it's going to be home page category product cart so it could be one of those four templates and I like to like cart is a really good place to start because you get yourself in less trouble because like cart we know the very next thing we want people to do is proceed to checkout and make a purchase so you set that as your goal uh go on the cart template and then within it a lot of times over time like the cart develops a lot of cruft and so I think the ideal Google optimized split tests and this is this has come up this has been kind of a minor theme here is what elements aren't aren't doing us any good what's cruft at this point you know can we just shave off some of this stuff and so just like Google split tests where we go this is the original version and this is the cleaned up version where we pulled all the garbage off and that's such an easy thing to do and optimize select the element hit remove it's gone like magic uh give me an example of cruft just hypothetically speaking all right on a cart page I off often see like a shipping calculator and I always think this is so weird like you're gonna get your your shipping rates in the cart just to go to checkout and then get them again like it's like well we doubled up on steps here so if if I see one of those like I'm immediately testing it by just like original versus we got rid of this thing I would actually now that you think about it there's a lot of corrupt there's like some people have coupon codes on there too yep and apply the coupon code and I bet that always hurts because if they don't find a coupon that works they might leave right yes I actually hid my coupon code field for a long time uh from people because they I found that people were just going off and going to like whatever those coupon sites were so I made them like it was just a link they had to click on it to expose the field and I I think that mitigated that problem a little bit it still happens but but having on the card page I personally think and again I don't have any data for this I personally think that's a No-No along with the calculator oh yeah the calculator drives me nuts yeah okay so start with a shopping cart and then what would be your like your next page I would then do um I'd work backwards then I go product and like the product form specifically tends to pick up a lot of junk and that's a thing that's like usually above the fold um or near it and so that's a good place to test that's also one where I'll test appearance like on the product form like all right what happens if I put like a light background and a border on this to call attention to it um sometimes that helps or it makes no difference in which case like choose which one you like better aesthetically and then all right collection page like hide show price is a common one um hero image collection description filter sidebar and then work back to home page and then home page is just like there's so many weird random sections on a home page yeah all right which of these help or hurt if you really want an exotic test that makes everybody nervous get rid of there I guarantee the first thing on your homepage is a hero image or a slider or video hide it you don't even replace it with anything else just hide it what happens that one often the site performs better without it really okay yeah that's fascinating okay here's why I I'm skeptical but I mean obviously you have data and I don't oftentimes if it's someone brand new and again I guess you have to test returning versus new if someone's brand new landing on your site and it's not clear what you sell or what you're good at feel like they're going to leave because you have to kind of prove to a new a new customer that I agree with you but I think often brand owners wildly overestimate how good their hero slides Etc are at explaining that that I can believe that I can believe okay that is very interesting that that test would scare me actually but I'd be very curious it scares everybody okay yeah that's good so I guess there is a distinction between you and returning visitors that you have to that you have to worry about when you're when you're running these all right I'm running a test on a site right now it's four days in so it's not statistically significant technically and we're doing it's their home page and I got three versions the original which has like hero content and shopping a version that's anything that's non-shopping is gone so this thing is just categories and products and then a version that does not have the hero slider that's the only thing I took out the shopping only site has a probability to beat the original of 96 and the version with no hero image 90 the shopping only site it is purely we took out any about any blog posts hero sliders all the content gone it is just these are the Departments these are the products yeah that one converts at 2.3 percent the version of the page that is just the original page minus the carousel slider converts at two percent and then the original with all the junk in it is one and a quarter so based on that it sounds like it's the hero image and it's because it's similar to what we talked about with the hero image on a collection page you're pushing so much stuff down the page right yeah and I I agree with uh it it makes it two to a sense also removing all navigation outside of like finding the product that you actually want to buy yeah I move all that stuff in the footer usually captive captive page uh I'm actually very curious uh about all the split tests that you're running and especially the one about like the Reversed price order I've always been very curious about that that one I'm gonna run and I figured out how to do it in my head it's going to be a redirect test using query strings yes yes that that would work yeah if you want to see more amazing interviews with successful entrepreneurs then check out this next interview right here I think you'll enjoy it and you'll definitely be inspired

Channel: MyWifeQuitHerJob Ecommerce Channel

Views: 7,880

Keywords: kurt elster, sales training, how to sell, sales strategy, best sales techniques, strategies to increase sales, how to increase sales, customer service, sales strategies, sales tips and techniques, sales tips and tricks, sales training for beginners, sales strategies and tactics, sales strategies for small business, sales strategies and techniques, sales strategies to increase sales, sales strategies for online business, ecommerce sales strategies

Id: 9s7VVShkcb8

Length: 42min 35sec (2555 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 09 2022