This is the holy grail, right? If there was a (relatively) easy, free way to make more money from your ecommerce shop, everyone would be doing it, right?

You would think so. Such a technique does exist. However, when I talk with shop owners, the vast majority of them haven’t heard of it, much less tried it. What’s up with that?

The technique is called split testing. It comes in a number of forms (which I’ll cover in another post). How it works is you come up with a theory as to how to improve your shop. The theory could be based on customer research, anayltics data or gut reaction. Let’s say for example, you have a theory that increasing the prominence of your search box will improve sales (it often will, but that’s a post for another day).

What you do is, using freely available and relatively easy to use tools, set up your shop so that half your visitors see the old search box and half of them see the new, (hopefully) improved search box. You define what the goal is – typically increasing the conversion rate of your site (the percentage of users that actually buy something – typically around 1 – 2% for small shops), but it can be other goals (more on that later as well), and sit back and wait. After a while – it could be days, weeks or months depending on a number of factors, you’ll get a report telling you exactly how much your change increased or decreased sales by.

For example, on a shop I help out with, I had a theory that changing the position of an important button in the checkout process would improve things. I followed the steps above and waited. Turns out this theory was right – sales increased 3.1%!

Some may think “3.1%, that’s hardly anything to get excited about”. Me? I’m super-excited about it! For one thing, it took me less than half an hour to set it up. Secondly, that 3.1% will keep going, year after year. Most importantly though is the cumulative effect. Sure, a 3.1% increase in sales (with no increase in marketing budget mind you!) isn’t going to make you rich. But what happens if you have 2 tests running at a time, and run each one for about 3 months? Assuming you get the same result from all of them, by the end of the year you’ve increased sales almost 25%! Now that’s something to get excited about.

Chances are some of your tests will perform worse than 3.1% – even reduce sales (so you don’t keep that change), but some might do better than 3%. Any shop I’m consulting on I try and have as many tests running at the same time as I can. I have 6 tests running on one shop as I write this. If each makes a 1% improvement, well, that’s 6%. Keep doing that, and soon you’ve got a damned profitable business.

If you want to jump into the deepend, get yourself a Google Website Optimizer account and go for it! For others, stick around and I’ll talk you through some of the details. As with most things, there’s a lot of traps for young players, I’ll help you avoid them.