Convert More Traffic into Revenue: A/B Testing Tips for SMB E-Commerce Websites

As we all continue learning to adapt to our ongoing, collective virtual reality, many small businesses have quickly moved online or significantly expanded their online presence to meet unprecedented consumer demand. In fact, it’s estimated that there will be an 18 percent increase in e-commerce sales in 2020, according to eMarketer. To meet the demand, many SMB businesses have turned to popular online e-commerce platforms to help them launch and scale quickly.

To maximize opportunities to convert more traffic into revenue, it’s essential to implement high-quality web experience optimization that helps brands create deeper relationships with their audiences, builds trust, increases retention, and encourages loyalty.

To win over high-intent visitors who are ready to convert, the experience your website provides can make all the difference. For instance, is your web experience conversational and customer-centric with progressive steps that guide the prospect closer to your desired conversion action? Or, does your site lead with product-focused language that aims to convert visitors the moment they land on the site?

Effective A/B Testing Best Practices

By conducting effective A/B testing, online small businesses can help more visitors shop with confidence, increase engagement, and boost conversion rates.

Here are some helpful tips for conducting effective A/B tests and improving your site performance.

• Design and continuously test a series of experiments against a control. Continuous testing means that you are indeed always testing. Testing for the purpose of finding a permanent winner assumes that your audience is static, unchanging, and that your business is, too.
• A/B test a variety of treatments that range from minor changes to major differences (i.e. multivariate elements on a page, to higher contrast flow changes across pages and steps).
• Determine volume of website traffic, as well as percentage of traffic split between control (i.e. your existing web experience) and variation(s). Higher traffic volume means you can design and test more variations against the control. To quickly identify a winning variation, it's important to analyze your typical traffic patterns over a 1-2 week span.
• Determine how to measure A/B test winners, based on materiality of business impact. In low volume, high value-per conversion settings (e.g., in demand and lead generation), simply comparing the volume and value of conversions between two variations may be enough. But in high volume, lower value-per conversion settings often found in e-commerce, statistical significance should be used to determine whether the experiment is performing better than the control. Statistical significance ranging from 80-95 percent, should be considered. Starting with 80 percent significance demonstrates an encouraging level of confidence in the results of the variation. For more on statistical significance in A|B testing or multivariate testing, see this Wikipedia article for a primer.

Benefits of Testing the Impact of Trustmarks on Your Website 

By continuously optimizing your web experience and testing variations of your site, you can identify new ways to better engage visitors and prospects. For instance, in order to allay shoppers’ concerns about shopping online, more and more e-commerce companies are testing the impact of trustmarks on their website.

In fact, thousands of SMB e-commerce companies have increased visitor trust through the use of TrustedSite’s system of trustmarks, called TrustedSite Certification.

You can peruse TrustedSite’s helpful ebook resource, “Consumer Trust: Tracking Concerns Throughout the Buyer's Journey,” which provides a thorough analysis of consumers’ concerns at each step of the online buyer’s journey. You’ll also learn how to build trust on your site, in order to convert more new visitors and keep returning customers coming back.

Learn more about how SMB e-commerce companies are boosting conversion rates by A/B testing the impact of trustmarks here!