With limited resources and an ever-increasing amount of data available to account for, today’s eCommerce teams are challenged with maximizing on-site conversions and ensuring their site’s user experience (UX) is seamless. excellent, using only his ingenuity, experience and a few software tools.
Here we’ll reveal two tangible solutions to the challenges eCommerce teams face, and cover how those same teams can navigate some of the most pressing issues holding them back.
Challenge 1: Taking the right approach to A/B testing
“Stop A/B testing, you’re wasting your time” (Matt Henton, Head of Ecommerce, Moss Bros.) At a recent maverick Future:Retail conference, washing machine enthusiast Matt Henton provoked a partisan e-commerce crowd with this quote during his presentation. Of course, it was largely a joke, but a point had to be made. Matt inferred that most teams waste more time than necessary testing absolutely everything and instead brands should better prioritize the tests they are running to only implement the tests they are very confident of a win.
Matt implored the teams to just fix “the broken stuff” on their sites. A quick win is to review your 404 logs and see if there are any recurring issues. If there is a particular 404 URL that is being visited multiple times, fix that issue before it becomes a problem and affects your revenue/user experience in the long run. Matt praised the need to really understand what users are actually doing (where they get frustrated and click multiple times on a particular “chunk” of content, for example).
What holds many e-businesses back is the fact that they have a hard time quickly answering the following questions:
How much money did my homepage hero banner make this week? Is it more or less than last week?
Does my hamburger menu or search bar convert more on my mobile site?
Why is the abandonment of the basket to pay so great?
Why are my returning visitors having difficulty completing a particular form?
Companies facing these questions often rely on traditional analytics for answers. But traditional analytics can only tell ecommerce teams what customers are doing on their site, not why and how they’re doing it. Some of those same eCommerce teams have used session replay tools to try to understand behavior, but the same frustrations crop up. Brands should look for tools that visually display aggregated user journeys, allowing them to understand why customers are leaving their site, as well as measure revenue and behavioral contribution from any “blocks” of content. There is a great need to understand golden or broken customer journeys, provide actionable insights to test hypotheses, and recognize why tests are winning or inconclusive.
Challenge 2: Mud wrestling with HiPPO
In every organization lurks a powerful and dangerous animal. The hiccups.
The HiPPO (Highest Paid Person Opinion) effect could have a detrimental impact on idea testing and raises the common challenge in eCommerce teams whether to test based on data or HiPPO.
How many of you typically test a hypothesis for one or both of the following reasons?
“Because I had an idea and I wanted to see if it would work…”
“Because my manager told me that…”
More common than not, test roadmaps focus on the above rather than those who use data to push, pull back, and explain their tests. Digital teams must reach a single source of truth. Your initial testing approach could be one of many; your business team, your marketing team, your CEO, or even worse, the “this is how we’ve always done it” mantra.
Testing is hard and people are used to doing things a certain way, so it’s hard to convince teams to change their approach. But as a digital team, the reality is that it’s your job to present facts, not biased opinions or hypotheses. Every brand will have preconceived ideas about their customers and what they want. Ecommerce teams across all industries need to develop a culture of replacing preconceived ideas with data.
Teams need to rely more on data as user behavior is highly nuanced so numbers alone won’t uncover usability issues. If you’re blindly following good benchmarks, this can lead to a cycle of finding quick-fix features and leading to a disjointed product. Questions arise:
How is the success of the test measured?
Is conversion rate always the right metric?
Success is about more than just conversion rate optimization (CRO), as eCommerce teams want users to come back and buy from their site time and time again. The right approach is to balance CRO with solving user problems to create long-term value. In an ideal world, you would want to test quantitatively and qualitatively at the same time, but how many brands have the time and resources to do it?
Instead, set metric targets before launching a test and then report on these alongside the traditional ‘win/lose’ view. And make sure you don’t get addicted to small profits. While they are important and the cumulative effect can be significant, you don’t want them to be a barrier to innovative product work that can delight your customers.