If you’re hoping to reach a higher level of performance with your Magento website then you need to put it to the test. An A/B test, that is. While it’s very important that you work with UX/UI experts to create a great shopping experience, you’ll find that even the best user interfaces can be improved with A/B testing. A/B testing is one of the most cost effective and efficient ways of figuring out what actually works on your eCommerce website and how best to connect with your target market. Because, what works for some websites and brands may not work for you. And if you don’t put it to the test, how will you know?

In this blog we’ll cover why A/B testing is essential, the basics of A/B testing and the best Magento extensions for A/B testing.

Why A/B Test?

You have a lot invested in your Magento store and it’s only natural to want to get the absolute most out of it. And while you have invested heavily in the UX/UI design of the site as well as your own internal testing, the only results that truly matter are real world results. By implementing A/B testing and analyzing its results, you can determine what does and doesn’t connect with your website’s visitors. For example:

• Pricing – A/B testing different levels of pricing can provide you with a better understanding of the prices your customers are actually willing to pay for your products. It is estimated that merchants are missing out on 5%-15% of profits because of imperfect pricing and unfavorable free shipping thresholds.
• Calls to Action (CTAs) – Altering the copy, font, colors, and even button designs can help you learn what CTAs your visitors will respond to. You may find that visitors will respond to a CTA about dwindling available inventory, but respond less to CTAs about sales offers and price reductions. You may have a higher conversion rate with a Green, ‘Order Now’ button rather than a Red ‘Order Now’ button. The only way to find out is through A/B testing.
• Page design – You may have the most informative and interesting content on the web but you may also have a page that is not skimmable to visitors. By testing with different page layouts and monitoring the bounce rate and the time guests spend on your pages, you can determine the ideal page design for visitor retention and conversion.

What is A/B Testing?

A/B testing has become quite the buzzword in recent years but it can be most simply described as creating two or more versions of a webpage and measuring the results to make improvements to the site and ultimately earn greater conversions and revenue. The alternate A/B versions of your site can include, but are not limited to, variations in the content, colors, images, copy, Calls-to-Action, and even prices. Through creating alternate versions of webpages and monitoring the activity you’re able to improve the overall quality of your website and increase conversions. It is through A/B testing that you’re able to come up with the optimum combinations of website elements that will keep visitors engaged and making purchases.

With the example below, 50% of visitors are shown Page A and 50% of visitors are shown Page B. Whichever version proves to feature elements that result in greater visibility, reduced bounce rates, increased conversions and more time-on-site is the superior page design and those elements should then be shown to 100% of visitors.

Best Magento A/B Extensions

A/B testing is not a native feature in Magento.  While there are many different methods and technologies available for powering A/B testing, below are a few of our favorites.

• HiConversion – The HiConversion extension was built based on the idea that your real-world customers and website visitors are your greatest teachers. HiConversion will run its own A/B tests automatically to your pages, changing the elements based on visitor behavior. It will then provide recommendations based on these continual and evolving A/B tests. It’s a great extension because, simply put, it chooses a winner faster through the automated testing of multiple variables.
• Optimizely – This extension focuses on personalization and web experimentation. It features an easy-to-use visual editor that allows users to safely and simply run multiple experiments on a single page. Optimizely is also one of the industry’s leading CRO platforms and it offers far more than website A/B testing including messaging platforms and mobile apps, allowing you to customize the entire customer experience from a platform that can grow with you as your conversion optimization needs expand.
• Apptimize – This is an extension built for mobile-centric brands. Apptimize allows users to A/B test personalized experiences, cross-platform experiments and more all through a data system specifically programmed for mobile data. Merchants can monitor how behaviour on mobile affects decisions made on web and vice versa. Or, how server-side changes impact the front-end mobile experience.
• A/B Tasty – This reasonably priced, drag-and-drop app is incredibly easy to work with. In addition to standard features like split and multivariate testing options, heatmaps and conversion optimization tools, A/B Tasty boasts a unique funnel testing feature that allows merchants to experiment with changes across multiple pages inside the sales funnel.

Conclusion

A/B testing your Magento store is critical to better understanding your customers, increasing your conversions and improving its overall usability and functionality. There are a number of excellent extensions available to your site in the marketplace.  To learn more about any of these A/B test extensions and how to optimize your ecommerce store, contact us today for a free consultation.

Shipping rate quotes are a critical piece of the eCommerce checkout user experience.  As the merchant, you can cause checkout conversion issues if the right options are not available or the rates are to high.  Conversely, if rate quotes are to low you can end up losing a lot of money on shipping. With the advancement of low cost expedited shipping options from Amazon in the past few years, it has become critical for eCommerce sites to leverage rate quoting solutions that provide customers with all the necessary shipping options, quoted at the correct price.

Out-of-the-box Magento comes equipped with some very good basic tools for powering shipping quotes. These tools include:

• Live rate quotes via API per product weight and destination for the major carriers (Fedex, UPS, USPS and DHL)
• Free shipping per cart and product conditions
• Flat rate per cart
• Table rates per product weight or cart total per city, state and zip code

If you have basic shipping requirements such as shipping all of your products from one warehouse, to one country, through one carrier, then the basic tools provided by Magento could suffice.

However, your shipping requirements may be more complex and require additional features to support some or many of the following:

• Shipping from multiple warehouses
• Using multiple carriers
• Dimensional shipping
• In-store pickup
• Smart packing (choosing what box a collection of items should ship in)
• LTL freight
• Hazardous materials
• Date and time display or selection

In this case, you will need a more robust set of tools for powering shipping quotes.  These tools can be sourced from one or all of the following:

• Third party apps
• Third party extensions
• Custom development

Third Party Apps

One of the first and best options for employing a robust set of shipping quote tools is to connect Magento to a third party software as a service (SaaS) app like ShipperHQ.  Third party SaaS apps work by connecting to Magento via APIs accessible through an extension installed into Magento. Once connected, Magento sends details about the items found in the cart to the app and the app returns to Magento shipping quote options that can be based on many variables and rules. Rules such as, but not limited to:

• Live rate API connections to the major carriers (UPS, Fedex, USPS, DHL and other major LTL Freight providers)
• Shipping from multiple warehouses
• Comparing and displaying lowest price per multiple carriers and tables
• Dimensional shipping
• In-store pickup
• Smart packing (choosing what box a collection of items should ship in)
• LTL freight
• Hazardous materials
• Date and time display or selection

Third party apps are often the most reliable and cost efficient method for getting high quality tools to power shipping quotes.  Since these apps are SaaS they benefit from the advantages gained through many users sharing the same set of features on one platform:

• Feature rich – since one platform must serve many types of business needs
• Lower cost – many users are shouldering the cost of development
• Higher quality (fewer bugs) –  there are so many active users, bugs are usually reported and fixed quickly
• High uptime and performance – the app is critical to the checkouts of thousands of merchants

The one downside of SaaS apps is that they cannot always cover every feature you may require for powering shipping quotes. However, some apps, like ShipperHQ, do provide custom flexibility in their Magento extension that allows their output to be filtered and adjusted within the Magento checkout code.  This allows for additional extension or custom custom module output to be integrated with the ShipperHQ shipping rate options in the Magento checkout.

Third Party Magento Marketplace Extensions

Another option for gaining additional shipping quote tools is to install third party shipping quote extensions to Magento.  Many extensions exist with features such as:

• Shipping from multiple warehouses
• Dimensional shipping
• In-store pickup
• Smart packing (choosing what box a collection of items should ship in)
• LTL freight tables
• Hazardous material surcharges
• Date and time display or selection

Third party extensions often do a good job at addressing one specific feature (ie. in-store pickup) but don’t necessarily integrate well with other shipping extensions.   If, for example you need in-store pickup and LTL freight tables, you would have to install two separate extensions. That could pose an issue since those separate extensions were not likely developed to work together.  It could take a good deal of custom code to make the LTL freight tables extension work with the in-store pickup extension and as a result there may be many bugs to work through with shipping rates. A further issue is that as Magento releases future upgrades and patches, additional effort will be required to maintain and update the integration of the two extensions.

A third party extension can be a great solution for one specific shipping rate feature, but combining many third party shipping extensions is typically not a good idea. This is because development costs to integrate the multiple shipping extensions will be high and you’ll likely spend a lot of time and effort resolving bugs.

Custom Development

Sometimes there are no third party apps or extensions that can deliver the features needed to power a shipping rate quote.  In these cases, custom development is required. Typically, custom development does not account for all the features and functionality needed in a shipping rate solution. Instead it is used to extend or bridge the functionality of native Magento features, SaaSfeatures or Magento extensions.

For example, in-store pickup. While there is a third party marketplace extension to provide this feature, the extension may not sort the closest stores available for pickup based on the shopper’s geo-ip location or shipping address.  In this case custom development could be used to leverage geo-ip data from another extension and shipping address information to provide the user with a list of in-store pickup locations that are closest to the buyer.

Custom development is often the last step in producing a first class shipping rate solution on Magento as it allows us to streamline the SaaS app, native feature or third party extension output to provide an optimized set of shipping or in-store pickup options at checkout.  In our experience, most sizable eCommerce merchants use custom development in conjunction with SaaSapps, third party extensions and native Magento features to create robust and competitive shipping options.

In Conclusion…

Providing your shopper with the shipping options they want has always been important, but now with the competition from Amazon Prime it has become critical.  Magento, together with its out-of-the-box features, SaaS app options, third party extensions and custom development options provides great affordable tools for helping you provide the shipping options today’s online shoppers are seeking.

To learn more about Magneto shipping options and how to get the absolute most out of your eCommerce site, contact us today. We are a certified Magento partner and have been developing eCommerce sites since the 1990’s. Put our experience to work for you.