According to the Department of Commerce, eCommerce sales have increased by 18.4% over the last year, so why are your sales staying the same? Two words: conversion optimization. Conversion Optimization opens the door to improving eCommerce results, and is used by the major players like Amazon.com to streamline their purchase funnels.

Amazon.com commands a whopping $61 billion a year, much to the credit of their avid use of A/B testing. Conversion optimization is what takes an online book company and turns it into one of the world’s most diverse marketplaces

At any given time Amazon will run any of several treatments:

· New home page design

· Visual hierarchy

· Content tests

· Moving features around the page

· Different algorithms for recommendations

· Changing search relevance rankings

By applying these treatments, Amazon was able to move from a complicated mess to an eCommerce giant. A/B testing isn’t just about improving the sales process, but can also reveal interesting results that optimize marketing efforts.

Chrome, a San Francisco based clothing and luggage company saw efforts that at first appeared to bear no fruit, however, closer inspection revealed much more. Chrome ran a test comparing a video to a product image to see which converted more. In the end, the video outperformed at checkout by 0.3 percent, and saw a 0.2 percent increase in successful orders with the video. These marginal results may not yield information that improves the sales process, but they do provide valuable information that can lead to optimized marketing efforts.

Chrome had learned that the video outperformed the product photo so marginally that either one was a good choice, so what should Chrome go with? In this scenario, the obvious choice was to pick the treatment that required the least marketing effort. This would save time and money in the marketing budget that would allow Chrome to explore new marketing techniques that would have been cannibalized by the video production costs. This test ultimately told them that videos performed marginally better, however when combined with the cost of production, the ROI was much higher with static images. This lesson would have been much harder to learn without A/B testing.

What if you wanted to broaden your online offerings? Do you risk distracting your customers with new options at the potential cost of lost sales? That is exactly the question that USell.com was asking after their satisfaction surveys revealed customers wished to sell more than their current offering of electronics. USell decided they would offer more products if their tests performed within 5% of their control group. After running the test two times, USell learned that adding more products had a -3% impact on their conversions. This result was within their goal, and allowed USell to expand their offerings as well as their marketing reach. The PR impact would more than make up for the minimal loss in conversions and would help USell scale.

Optimization has shown to be a valued tool by eCommerce giants like Amazon, Chrome and USell, but is there any value for smaller teams? That’s exactly the question Insound.com was asking itself when they rolled out a new shopping experience to their customers.

Insound was the first online music store, selling everything from vinyl to tshirts and posters. They had a very dedicated user base, but wanted to improve their sales experience. When Insound rolled out their new shopping cart they decided to test the messaging to see if they could clarify the process. After only 2.5 weeks they were able to determine that one variant performed 30% better than all of the others and saw a conversion rate increase of 8%. These results came just in time for their holiday offerings and put Insound in a great position to continue optimizing their sales process.

Takeaways

The value of conversion optimization is much more than just streamlining sales. So what should you take from these examples? The key points are:

· Conversion optimization drives real ROI

· Optimizing can be inexpensive if done right

· As little as 2 weeks can show results

· The smallest change can have a big impacts

· Expand your offerings and messaging

· Negative or neutral results are valuable

There are few that can command $61 billion in online sales, but none can do it without optimization.

Find out how you can increase conversions with Optimizely by taking a tour.

Learn more about eCommerce optimization by checking out these articles.