How A/B Testing Can Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

Hannah Juley
Hannah Juley
October 9th, 2019
Estimated read time: 4 minutes, 3 seconds

An issue all online stores have in common is shopping cart abandonment. This means one of the main areas of focus for all online stores is (should be!) conversion optimization. Optimizing your checkout experience and shopping cart is essential for your online store to combat shopping cart abandonment and drive more successful conversions while providing a seamless checkout process for your consumers.

As a customer, you might not think twice about leaving an item in your shopping cart indefinitely. But, cart abandonment is a serious problem for businesses because it represents a direct hit to your conversion rate. In fact, nearly 70% of online shoppers who begin a purchase will ultimately abandon their shopping carts before fully converting. How do you avoid becoming part of that statistic? Start with A/B testing your checkout process.

Why is A/B Testing Important?

The most successful online stores are highly effective at converting their website visitors into paying customers. Your checkout process is essential to reducing shopping cart abandonment because, in today’s online world, it’s all about the customer experience. You can use A/B testing to find out whether a modified store design will help or hinder your current conversion rate on your checkout page.

Use Data to Optimize Your Online Store and Checkout Experience

Changes to your online store and shopping cart should never be made on a whim. It’s essential to research A/B testing to determine whether the changes to your checkout page are going to make a positive impact on your business. This research is especially crucial for your shopping cart functionality.

Here are the five A/B tests that will help optimize your shopping cart and combat cart abandonment:

  1. Test value propositions and special offers
  2. Test the number of steps in the checkout process
  3. Test separate CTA buttons for payment options
  4. Test featuring confidence builders such as BBB stickers, security labels, and customer quotes
  5. Test cross-sell and upsell options

How to Run an A/B Test

With A/B testing, you make a copy of your current checkout pages featuring one specific design change and use a third-party service—or some clever work by your web team—to automatically direct half of your site visitors to one version of the web store and half to the other. After a sufficient testing period has elapsed, analyze reporting data to see which design resulted in a higher conversion rate, and implement that checkout process for all store visitors.

See what a real A/B test is like in action by checking out our recap of, [Webinar] How Conversion Optimization Can Transform Your Digital Campaigns, we did with Spiralize CEO, Ali Nasser, to get a picture of what A/B testing would look like for you!

A/B Testing Shopping Cart Experiences

A/B testing your shopping cart experience must have statistical significance. In other words, implementing post-purchase account creation for a dozen sites doesn’t offer sufficient information to form a conclusion. Generally, you conduct A/B testing on thousands of transactions that take place over a few weeks. This testing will help you determine if the sales are cyclical, or if they are under the influence of outside factors, including:

  • Day of the week
  • Holidays
  • Hour of the day
  • Geography

Another factor to consider is how the A and B tests are split up. Are you:

  • Splitting them 50/50?
  • Testing traffic exclusively from one country, or spreading it around the globe?
  • A/B testing one product line, or several different lines?
  • Testing with coupons and promotions
  • Ensuring that traffic tested is coming from the same source of data (i.e., Google search results, AdWords, affiliates, etc.)?

You invested a significant amount of time and resources towards developing incredible products that customers love. The next step is to increase sales so you can increase your conversion rate. A great strategy to earn more revenue is to implement and test strategies to reduce cart abandonment. These strategies include:

A/B Testing with a Full-Service Ecommerce Platform

While there are several alternatives available for conducting A/B testing for shopping cart optimization, a full-service ecommerce solution is undoubtedly the most convenient option. With FastSpring, you’ll not only have the ability to conduct several A/B tests simultaneously, but you don’t have to pay for the additional traffic. Other platforms charge you based on the number of tests you run.

A full-service platform like FastSpring makes it easy to update pricing, payment methods, checkout flows, and more. This means you can create a seamless customer experience that will drive more conversions from your shopping cart!

Are you interested in seeing how FastSpring can help you conduct your A/B testing to improve shopping cart optimization? Click here to request your free demo today!

Hannah Juley

Hannah Juley

Hannah is a recent graduate from UC-Santa Barbara. Her prior experience in marketing lead her to the FastSpring Marketing Coordinator role. Hannah assists with content, social media and department expenses. Outside of work, you can find her at the beach either playing volleyball or reading a book.

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