Don't make this big mistake with your e-commerce website's redesign

DTC Brands are not A/B testing

In our time building Viddy, we've spoken to several dozens of DTC e-commerce brands and it's shocking how many of them don't A/B test in general and also spend significant time doing site designs. When you aren't A/B testing, you can't properly measure the impact of a huge site redesign / revamp!

A/B testing is essential for any e-commerce website, as it allows you to test different versions of your site to see what works best for your customers and your business. A proper A/B test will inform a brand on the exact impact of the test on critical e-commerce metrics like conversion rate, engagement (time on site / average session duration), bounce rate, retention, LTV, etc. Without testing, you are essentially going in blind with what you release on your site unless you have very high conviction on what you are updating like a bug fix for example.

We understand why site redesigns can be important as they give a brand an opportunity to rebrand, showcase new products and offerings, update to reflect new values, etc. There are many reasons, but the amount of effort that goes into a redesign is almost always significant. We've talked to 30+ e-commerce brands (some on Shopify, Webflow, Wix, Woo Commerce, Typedream, and Next.js / React.js among others) and a high percentage of them are undergoing or planning to do a site redesign in the near future. The time it takes can vary from 1-6 months and in some cases even longer depending on if there are also infrastructural code changes. When the investment of time and effort is so large, it's imperative to be able to measure the impact of the overall initiative.

Why DTC brands don't A/B test

After talking to many DTC brands, the biggest reason we find brands not A/B testing site updates and features is because (1) it requires effort and (2) their store provider platform (Shopify for example) does not support A/B testing out of the box. Brands need to use external A/B testing tools such as Optimizely, Convert, Google Optimize, or app plugins on their store provider platform. While using tools like this do take some setup effort, it's actually not as bad as brands think and the return on investment is well worth it. It gives brands a true data driven approach to how they operate and these brands are the ones that grow the fastest and have the best metrics. The data from the 30+ DTC interviews we've conducted supports this. When you A/B test, every test enables the brand to properly measure the ROI on it. Brands should be using this testing methodology to prove if the services they are paying for actually give back the ROI needed to justify the payment.

We understand the importance of A/B testing at Viddy and that's why we have built out A/B testing within our platform. We give brands the ability to A/B test different pieces of video content to understand which content works best on their site. When brands see the impact of different videos via Viddy on key e-commerce metrics like engagement and conversion rate, it gives them a data-driven approach to constantly iterate and improve these metrics which feeds directly into the success of the brand. Brands that have used Viddy have been able to increase their overall conversion rate by 18% and increase their user engagement by 76%!

The Power of A/B Testing in Numbers

To show the power of A/B testing let's look at a simple numerical example. Let's assume the following about a DTC Shopify brand:

• Brand does $10M in annual revenue
• Brand conversion rate is 5%
• Brand does a site redesign and finds conversion rate drops to 4%

In the scenario above, the brand's site redesign caused their conversion to drop by 20%. This is a $2M dollar loss over the year with all else constant! Without A/B testing, brands can be losing huge chunks of revenue without knowing. On the flipside, say the brand's site redesign increased their conversion rate to 6%, then the brand is pocketing an additional $2M in revenue per year and they can attribute this gain to the site redesign.

Methods of A/B testing a site redesign

There are several ways to test a site revamp / redesign. One way is to setup a separate subdomain that the new site redesign would live on ('shop.mystore.com' vs 'mystore.com' for example). Once this is set up, you could keep all the url paths 1:1 across the 2 sites and simply do a traffic split test where 50% of visitors would go to shop.mystore.com and 50% would go to mystore.com. This way the brand can effectively measure performance on each of the sites in terms of what they care about: conversion rate, AOV (average order value), engagement, retention, bounce rate, etc. One of the risks with testing a site design with this method is that the brand wouldn't get any data from the A/B test until the entire site design was built out, which could take a long time.

A better approach to testing a site redesign is doing so incrementally. What we mean by that is if the brand wants to redesign a PDP (product detail page) to improve its UX and UI, then they could A/B test just a single product's PDP first by testing the original url vs a new url that hosts the same product, but uses the new design / template for the PDP ('mystore.com/products/airpods' vs 'mystore.com/products/airpods-2' for example). The major benefits of this approach are (1) that it's easier to measure the isolated performance of a single PDP page (it's possible in a site redesign some pages might perform better and some worse) and (2) the brand can get data on this much quicker before rebuilding the entire site. There are certainly other ways to test a site redesign as well.

Get in touch

If you found this post on A/B testing or if you want to start A/B testing shoppable video content on your website with Viddy, please contact us here.