One should be familiar that there are always tests being conducted around the world. Some for science, some for medical research - and then, there’s testing for online retail and ecommerce. Chances are that while shopping online, you were part of a test or experiment to optimize website performance, improve the consumer experience, or otherwise glean learnings about shopper behavior that will influence retailers' future investments in ecommerce technology.
Think back to a grade school science fair where the scientific method was used. Retailers are curious, and they have their own observations and questions about improving their online business performance.
Online retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Chewy, and others deploy a variety of tools to test the performance of their websites for their own internal knowledge. Most savvy retailers have a holistic test & learn plan to explore multiple elements of their website, with the intent of driving improved conversion rates, higher add to carts, larger basket sizes, and lower returns. There is a long list of the tests that can be conducted in a controlled, measurable environment.
Brands have longed for these capabilities to deploy across their own catalogs on digital marketplaces, and only in the last couple of years has Amazon started to provide sellers and vendors access to some limited tools for these tests. Brands now have the ability to run A/B tests on product titles, main images, and A+ content with the Manage Your Experiments (MYE) tool. Brands can launch controlled tests quickly and easily determine if the changes they are making actually drive improvements to KPIs like conversion rate, basket size, add to cart, and more. With these free tools, there’s no longer an excuse to not be testing a content optimization strategy.
Once your initial tests are done, take your positive results, and apply them at scale to the rest of your catalog. In one example, a client was able to test their main product image without the packaging vs with the packaging. We found that the packaging shot received a 180% higher conversion rate and drove 2.2x more sales. From here, one should develop more hypotheses, conduct more experiments, and draw conclusions. The cost to conduct these tests are low, and the ROI can be huge, so get curious and always be testing.
