ReplaceDirect, a Visual Website Optimizer customer, is a successful Dutch e-commerce site. It’s one of the biggest retailers in the Netherlands in the field of parts and accessories for notebooks and other mobile equipment. The main focus is on energy products like batteries and power supplies, but the product range is quite extensive.
They recently did an A/B test using Visual Website Optimizer where the winning variation reduced cart abandonment by 25%. For e-commerce sites, cart abandonment is one of the most frustrating aspects of business. After all, there’s no company that likes a potential customer to abandon the purchase after spending tons of time on site research and selecting the right products. Fortunately, cart abandonment can be fixed using A/B testing and this case study demonstrates how ReplaceDirect did it.
A recent study by Forrester found out that shipping costs rank as the number one reason for shopping cart abandonment. Combined with other reasons found out in the research, it can be concluded that visitors abandon their shopping cart because they are unsure about additional costs or surprised to find out (only after entering the payment process) that they are actually charged more than they expected. In order to prevent such surprises, ReplaceDirect already tells the customer in an early stage that no shipping costs will be added. So the customer is clearly informed right from the start. This is exactly what ReplaceDirect wanted to test: will it help reduce cart abandonment when a clear order overview is provided during the initial steps of checkout?
Another cart abandonment study by Paypal
They tested their second step of the checkout procedure. It’s the page where customers are asked to fill out their personal information and shipping address. ReplaceDirect made several changes to the page. Probably the most important change was the insertion of an order overview, comprising the product(s), total costs and delivery date. ReplaceDirect also mentions several benefits at this page; these were changed to more relevant benefits specifically matching this step in the order process. Finally the layouts of the page and the form were changed to yield a cleaner look. Several fields, which were not absolutely necessary, were removed. Following are the screenshots:
Control page
Variation page: 25% reduction in cart abandonment
Their new version performed significantly better, reducing cart abandonments by 25%. As a direct result of this reduction, they saw a 12% increase in sales (14% by the time of pushing all new traffic to the new page). ReplaceDirect says they expected the new version to perform better, but an increase that high turned out to be a pleasant surprise. Well, it is always nice to have a 14% increase in sales without releasing any new products or without spending money on ways to get more traffic to the website. 
When we asked them if they had any lessons for other e-commerce sites; here is what they had to say:
Try to give the customers exactly the information they need at that particular page or section and leave out the redundant. Always put yourself in the customer’s shoes. This may not be easy so: test it!
ReplaceDirect also had some praise for Visual Website Optimizer:
VWO was very valuable. The ease to set up a test and real-time results made it great to work with.
We are very happy that ReplaceDirect reported these great results by doing an A/B test using our tool.
If you manage an e-commerce site without doing any A/B split testing, you are certainly leaving a lot of money on the table.
RIPT Apparel is a Chicago-based online retailer of one-of-a-kind designer tees and wearable art. They sell one new design by a new artist every day starting at midnight CST for $10 and it is only available for a period of 24 hours. After that period, the design rests in peace forever in the T-shirt graveyard and a new one takes over its place. The sense of urgency created by limited availability of the design can be used effectively to drive sales and that is what RIPT Apparel did in their first A/B test.
They had never done A/B testing before but were intrigued by the concept and wanted to give it a shot. The tool they selected for this purpose was Visual Website Optimizer. They tested their current buy button against a new buy button to determine which would have the best conversion rate. The conversion rate here being sales of their T-shirts.
The following is their control version (or default). Observe that the button isn’t the first thing to catch your attention as it blends well into the overall color scheme.
Original Version
They saw an opportunity for improvement, so they replaced their existing button with an attention-grabbing button with a different color scheme (green). See version A of the button below:
Version A – Control
Much to their surprise, they immediately saw a rise in sales. Ideally, they should have A/B tested the new version against the old but this was their first time and as you will read further they did a great job overall. Encouraged by the results, they went ahead and created another variation of the button. This time they decided to emphasize on the tactic that they should have used all along: emphasizing “limited 24-hour availability”. It has been demonstrated again and again that a sense of urgency drives up the conversion rate and this time too it proved to work best. Following version (B) of the button increased their site sales by 6.3% (notice only the button was changed – no new offers, no new products, no new policies).
Version B – 6.3% increase in sales
Pause for a moment and think what really happened in this case study. Someone (RIPT Apparel) with no previous experience in the field decides to A/B test, spends time researching what could work better, designs button variations, uses Visual Website Optimizer and sees a 6.3% rise in sales. No gimmicks, no new offers, no change in company strategy. Simply testing of sensible better variations of buy now button.
That 6.3% rise in sales will be hopefully permanent, so this one time effort would pay back RIPT Apparel many times over for time to come. Here is what they had to say after the test ended:
“According to Visual Website Optimizer we found our conversion rate improved a whopping +6.3%! We were astonished by this result. We had no idea that changing one button could result in an increase in sales and have that much of an impact. We wish we found this tool much earlier. “
It is important not to forget the role of the tool here. Visual Website Optimizer has been designed with a sole focus on ease of use, while avoiding technical hassles as much as possible. When we asked about the role of the tool in their first A/B test, RIPT Apparel said:
“The sales we have seen since changing and experimenting with our buy button have proven Visual Website Optimizer invaluable. I had some issues setting it up due to our shopping cart system and the team at Visual Website Optimizer walked me through step by step in order to set it up correctly.
As a result of this test I was able to go back to my partners and show them the results, which they were very happy with. Version B. is now live on our site and sales continue to rise.”
A great thing about tasting success with A/B testing is that it pumps you up to do even more A/B testing. So, RIPT Apparel are all set for their next phase of testing:
“We learned to test and test often. We think now that this test is over, we are going to try and test a few different color options, maybe even try some wording choices for our buy button.”
RIPT Apparel is a great company that successfully proved that A/B testing is not something that only Fortune 500 companies can do. Even small-medium sized online business can optimize and increase their sales by not mistaking A/B testing as a hyped-up fad. A/B testing works and it is addictive; one simply needs to try it at least once.
By the way, you should check out RIPT Apparel’s T-shirts – they are really quite cool!
AquaSoft was founded in 1999 and is a pioneer in photo presentation software. Their products cover a wide range from slide show creation, desktop publishing, photo books, etc. They recently candidly shared details from their latest A/B testing project, where they used Visual Website Optimizer for increasing sales from their eCommerce site by 20%. Here are the details on the test as told by AquaSoft:
Question: What was the conversion goal of the test?
Answer: The goal was to increase the sales on our product overview page. This page already had a higher conversion rate than the rest of our pages because people who visit this page already are interested in buying.
Question: On which page did you run the test?
Answer: Shop Overview (listing of all articles).
Question: Which part of page did you select for the test and what variations did you test?
Answer:
Original version (click to expand)
Redesigned version (click to expand)
Question: Why did you think that the variations you created had better chances to beat the original? What were you actually testing in this test?
Answer:
Note that we did not add any new feature nor the guarantee was new. It was just not described on the old page.
Question: What results did you get? Were you surprised by the results?
Answer: Improvements started with about 50% but settled on about 35-40% after some time. I was very happy with the result but didn’t trust it. What was measured by VWO were the clicks into the shopping cart, not the actual sales.
So I measured the sales with the funnel visualization of Google Analytics which showed an increase of 17.7% of actual sales. It also proved that the number of clicks into the shopping cart were about the same what VWO had measured. It shows that the bounce rate within the shopping cart was somewhat higher in the winning combination but the overall increased click rate outtakes the bounce rate.
In the second phase, we removed some whitespace and moved the product name above the box shots and gained another 10% increase in clicks and the final increase in sales settled at about 20%.
Question: Any lessons which can be derived from your test?
Answer: Don’t think your website is good as it is. Always test, always improve. It’s a slow process but worth doing.
Our concrete test shows that a clear modern design improve sales. Especially in the sales process trust building is very important.
Question: How valuable was Visual Website Optimizer for this test?
Answer: Is was so incredible easy to create the test (A/B split test in this case) that it takes nearly no time. Because we use an external shopping cart we can not measure in the cart itself so the feature of VWO tracking a click on a link without loading the page made it possible to run the test at all.
