E-commerce Challenges You Can Solve with Testing

Right? So today we will be focusing on how you can use testing in a more creative way to solve issues for eCommerce. Actually, you can take it away from here.

Akshay Saxena:

Alright. Hello, and welcome everyone, to today’s session where, as Muthu mentioned, we will be covering some of the top challenges faced by eCommerce businesses and, you know, how to solve them using A/B testing and experimentation strategies. Please bear with me. Unfortunately, I was not able to pull up my camera on time. There was some technical glitch, and it doesn’t seem to work.

So apologies for that. But we’ll keep our attention on the slide so that we can focus more over there. So a quick introduction about myself. I’m Akshay and, I take care of business expansion and growth strategies for VWO in the APAC region. Spent about a little over half a decade with VWO and, that helped me gain extensive experience, working with a lot of eCommerce businesses across the globe.

Some of them, you can also see on the screen. I’ve been able to develop a good understanding of what really the challenges are, what works, and what doesn’t work in their day-to-day life when it comes to conversions. A little bit about VWO, our company, for those of you who are new to the name, you know, VWO is basically an all-in-one platform that offers full funnel optimization. Right?

For example, A/B testing and user behavior analysis are the products that fall into this portfolio. So if you expect to optimize your user experience on the website. VWO is a good tool for that. Alright. Let’s get started with the agenda for our discussion today.

Feel free to shoot any questions you might have in the chat window or the questions tab. And we will be happy to accommodate them later during the last few minutes of the session. So before we dig down into the challenges themselves. Let’s quickly have a look at some industry-level statistics that prove that the eCommerce sector is growing rapidly with massive revenues. And if you could take a closer look at the slide, the numbers will quickly suggest how aggressively the market share is growing.

Right? Even during the pandemic when digital transformation was at its peak, eCommerce was one sector that was doing exceptionally well. As people were not only working from home, but also shopping from home. And today with a larger percentage of the population having access to the internet, eCommerce space, especially in the APAC region is expected to see its all-time high, sometime soon, and that’s what the numbers also suggest on the slide. This particular slide, like the second half of it mostly talks about how people are already spending a lot of money on stuff like SEO ads and PPC, etc.

So when it comes to optimizing user experience, even for an eCommerce store, we all understand that there’s a specific spend that goes into the situation already. But the idea here is to understand that it’s not about just spending the money because there’s no control over how much returns you can get through SEO, PPC ad campaigns, etc. Different companies have to have different marketing budgets ranging from 10% to even 40% of their budgets, which are invested into these things in marketing, etc. The message that you’re trying to put across over here is that it’s not always necessary that the bigger giants like Amazon and Flipkart with their deep pockets are the ones to have the maximum number of customers. Smaller companies or people with a low appetite for the marketing side of things can be really creative with their budget spend. And this is where testing and experimentation also fit the bill.

So, not just the bigger companies are supposed to have, like, a variety of customers in their portfolio. Even the smaller companies being creative can actually, get that done in their favor. So what are the challenges we’re gonna be discussing in a very elaborate manner today? Right in front of you, we are going to cover 3 challenges mainly. Competition, cart abandonment, and user experience.

So given the time that I’ve spent here at VWO and based on the past experiences that I’ve had, I realized that there could be multiple challenges in this particular space, but something which I keep hearing a lot from customers when I interact with them directly are these 3. Competition is the biggest followed by cart abandonment and user experience. So we’ll start with competition. And in this context if I were to ask, why should someone shop at your store? Or why should I go to your website to buy a product, versus a competitor’s? Why not like, a second name? What would be the answer? Right? Usually, I’ll hear things like maybe I have a better variety of items that you’re offering.

You have a better price to offer. You may have a very solid UX that you’re delivering. That’s why you want me to shop with you and not with a competitor. Right? But the important part for us to understand here is that you know, would you completely understand your website’s unique value proposition?

That’s one of the key strategies to quickly attract your customers. Right? Basically, to be able to tell what is working with you and what is better in your offering as compared to a competitor you need to have those things straight up. And let me just use an example to sort of illustrate this particular portion. So let’s say I do a regular Google search on Nyka eyeliner, right, by the way, Nyka is a fashion and beauty unicorn based out of India.

And when I do that search, one of the things that comes up is a competitor called Elf. So if you look at the section, that is highlighted, I search for eyeliner, Nyka, and I can clearly see that there’s an ad spend over here, which takes me directly to the landing page of Elf Cosmetics. So the spending is there. You’ve done your job in terms of paid marketing, etc. And I do see that if I look for my cart, I also have the option to look at it.

But the issue here is that the moment I click on that link, it directly takes me to the product page without highlighting a specific USB, right, or without having me understand, why am I actually choosing Elf over Nyka, because after all, what I searched was the original search itself was Nyka and not Elf. So the ad spend is there. The ad is right there on the top, but if I go and click on that link, it takes me to their regular product page without highlighting any specific USB. Now to compare this or contrast, let’s also try to understand using a different example how this could have been done better or what other companies are doing. If you search CleverTap on Google, CleverTap is a very prominent name when it comes to mobile app communication and engagement platforms.

And if I search on the link, it directly takes me to a competitor link as well, similar to what we discussed in the last example. Searching CleverTap enables me to also look at the competitors. And in this case, instead of taking me to a generic page, if I look at it and if I just see, okay, I’m comparing it with more engaged, you can see on the screen that it doesn’t take me to a genetic page. On the right-hand side, the screenshot is of the landing page where it takes me. So in this scenario, instead of just putting a direct link to my existing product page, they’re actually sort of taking me to a more personalized page.

The messaging is extremely clear. Right? They wanna show the audience more relevant stuff. They want to know how CleverTap engagement differs. And there’s a straight call to action button where they want you to schedule a demo with them and have a better understanding of what the offering is.

So this is basically a very introductory example. Right? This is basically to understand how the concept really works, even with something as basic as ad spending with respect to competition. This is one concept that you can utilize to make it more personalized for your audience. Now what is the takeaway here?

Like, what are we trying to get to with this particular message? The idea is that using experimentation you can really test what’s working and what’s not working against a competitor that people are searching for. You could use things like discounting, better variety, free shipping, and so on. There could be multiple things that you could experiment with just to gain that right attention and not just push them towards a generic landing page instead of where they have no context about why you’re better than your competitor. I’m now actually gonna take you to the VWO dashboard to show you how easy this is to set up when it comes to a real-time situation. What are we expecting? How do we expect this to do? So let me just quickly take you to my dashboard. This is what a VWO dashboard typically looks like.

And if I have to test a copy, all I have to do is come to this page and just put in the URL that I wanna test out. Oh, that’s it. One sec. Okay. So let’s say if I were to just redirect them to this home page of mine.

Right? Instead of just putting a regular headline over there, I could just simply say something like this. Maybe I’ll just use a new headline here. Something with the network, I guess. It’s just stuck sorry for that case.

I’ll just navigate to a different page and trying to try to show you over here. So let’s say if this was the page that I was landing on, I can just use VWO to change the headings that I was talking about. So if I were to play around with the messaging on this particular page, not sure why this is not working. Okay. I’ll try one more time, or we’ll just skip this.

M:

Hey, Akshay. I’ve sent you a link. Check if that one is.

AS:

I think it should be working now. Alright. Perfect. So this is the example that I was talking to you about, guys. So instead of putting a generic page over there, where you just redirect the users looking for a competition, they have no idea why they should choose you over the competition.

You can do a more personalized headline or more personalized messaging on that particular page where you can say, okay. We have better variety, and we have lower prices. They have complete context about why they should choose you. There could be multiple other headlines that you could play around with. For example, original Elf eyeliners and at 10% cheaper than, like, Nyka.

Right? So you can just straight away dominate your competition over here. And then make it look as attractive or customizable as possible. So that’s one of the examples that we wanted to talk about with respect to competition.

Right? Moving back to the slide here. So we will now move to the second challenge that we were hoping to discuss in our session today, which is cart abandonment. The break of every eCommerce site. Right?

So a while ago, VWO did a study on over 300,000,000 shoppers to really understand some common issues for cart abandonment. Like, what are the reasons that people abandon their carts? So we worked on a few use cases over there, but I’m just picking up the top 2 use cases in the interest of time. And, there’s an ebook, like I said, that we’ve also published. 

If you are interested in taking a look at the ebook, you can just download it from our website, or we can have it sent to you. That said, each side will have its challenges. So, we always suggest that you start with the data. Like, the data points, check out your website conversion funnel end to end and see where exactly the drop-off is happening and why. Right?

I’ll also share some examples in the VWO dashboard on how you can closely monitor your funnel within VWO. But Let’s focus on these two reasons. So the first reason we wanna focus on is hidden or unexpected shipping costs. Right? People don’t wanna be surprised when they’re moving, like, from the funnel, from the beginning towards the end of the funnel, homepage, category page, product page, add to cart, and checkout, and only at the checkout page do they realize that there’s an additional shipping cost, which, of course, is not in favor.

So today, that is one big problem that we have identified. People don’t wanna be surprised at the last minute, and, you know, they just completely drop off because they don’t want to pay that extra price. So that’s one use case that we can always test. And the second one is landing page distractions, how people land on the website and get super confused about what to buy, what’s the buying process, how to go about it, etc. We’ll go into these details quickly one by one. So for the first one, the hidden unexpected shipping cost that I was talking about, I’ll use an example of one of our clients showing up, of course, into retail. And if you see on the screen, there are two variants that we are trying to display. One is the control. Control means the original website. And the second one is the variation. Right? Now in terms of the variation, there are 2 options that you can play around with. One is they’re trying to show the shipping cost as free. So there’s no shipping whatsoever.

And then there’s another one that says you are $19 away from free shipping. So they’re trying to put across the messaging, which enables the customer to be eligible for free shipping just with that top banner over there. Right? So that’s one kind of messaging that we wanna play around with, like I said, to eliminate this problem of having shipping costs and what will work because we always want to try out things, whether we’re getting better conversions with shipping or without shipping cost.

That is something that can be tested out quite easily using the VWO dashboard. Let’s quickly go back into the dashboard and see how this one’s gonna work. So instead of going to show up only, I’ll just use any other example, or maybe I’ll just go to the home page of show up here. And this time around, I’m going to pull this up in a mobile environment because that’s the example that we were using. So let’s say I want to pick a product and I want to play around with my messaging around the shipping costs, etc.

How do I go about it? Let me just pick up one product here. So let’s say I got this. And maybe I’ll just pick this one. Now this is the top panel that I was referring to.

They have one over here, which talks about taking a further 30% discount off on already produced styles with a minimum spend of $100. And this kind of messaging can also work here in the example that we’re talking about. So let’s say if I add a new banner if I have to test with shipping costs, etc., I simply put a banner on the top by using this option in VWO. Okay. I think there’s something wrong with my editor today.

I’m sorry for this. Yep. Something like that. So I’m using a COVID-19 example over here just to get more attention on this particular banner on the top. But that’s how you can play around with different messaging even on the card abandonment page.

So you can offer discounts, you can offer lesser costs for adding more products, etc. So there will be multiple combinations that you could work with. And, using VWO, it’s also easy to have that messaging done on the website or on the mobile interface that you’re working on. Now these are the 2 big or let’s say the main issues, right, that we sort of spoke about.

One was once again, just to recap quickly, hidden or unexpected shipping costs. And the second one was landing page distractions. Right? In terms of landing page distractions, we can actually use this example again. So we can go to Nyka.com.

I’m not saying that it’s a bad website or a bad landing page, but just trying to translate an example of how the customer can get confused when it comes to getting too many options on the page. So if you look at this page and, the moment I land on it, there are hundreds of offerings that I already see here. Right? And as a customer, I always have something in mind that I want to buy. Right?

But if you look at this, there’s a lot of distraction on this page. A lot of options to work with. And as a customer, the only thing that is gonna happen at the end of the day is I’m gonna get confused. I’m not gonna be sure about what I should buy or which product is better than the other. What is the main requirement that I have as of now? So all I’m trying to do is confuse the customer to the core.

How does VWO fit into this scenario? You can just simply use this domain. Let’s say whatever link you’re working on. I’ll just use an illustration for this one also. So going back to the editor, let’s say if I want to work on reducing distraction on a certain page, Do I have to go back to my developer and ask him to remove certain elements? No. You just need to simply put the URL in this dashboard. Go to next.

And I’ll just wait for the page to load up. There you go. And then I’ll just quickly see what works based on my assumptions, based on the data points that I’ve run. Maybe this particular section is not getting enough clicks. Right?

Or I’m not seeing enough interaction or clicks happening on this section. So I can just simply get rid of those by using very easy features in VWO called ‘Remove’. So if I select that particular window and I say remove, it just simply allows me to remove the entire window. And, you know, I can just come up with something better, or I can just come up with something new on that particular page. Right?

So removing distractions is very easy. All you have to do is make sure you have an idea of what’s working, and what is not working, and then the visual editor with VWO will allow you to make those changes on the go without you having that back and forth with your developer, okay, I wanna make this change. I wanna make that change. And, you know, that goes live on the website in 1 week or 2 weeks. Alright.

So I think one more thing that I wanted to show you with respect to cart abandonment, like the previous use case that we were discussing. I’m sorry. I’m taking a step back here. But this is very important as we analyze these data points. So I understand today a lot of marketers and data analysts expect to work with analytical tools like Mix Panel, Google Analytics, and so on and so forth.

But are we really getting the complete picture of what is happening? Why am I losing so many people at a certain stage of the funnel? Right? We know what? We know the numbers.

We know exactly how much drop-off is happening in each part of the funnel. But do we know about the why part of it? Usually, the answer is no. Because, of course, just by looking at the numbers, I don’t know why, you know, let’s say if this is an example on the screen, 82% of people are dropping off on stage 1. 76% here and 48% over here.

With this, I am really not sure about what is actually causing the users to drop off between these stages. And there is an option in VWO that allows me to have a look at the why part of it that I was discussing. So, basically, this is more about understanding why people are dropping off just by looking at their real-time activities.

So this tool does not only give me the numbers but also gives me a real-time understanding of what could be the potential reason that they’re dropping off. Right? And I’ll just show you a quick example here of how you can interpret the data over there. Just using one example from one of our corporate websites. And that’s how the interaction is happening on this particular page.

So instead of just working with this part of the data, which is the white part, like many people are dropping off here. I also have some visuals now to understand where are they clicking. Instead of numbers, I have an additional layer that tells me what’s working and what’s not working. Maybe I was assuming that they’re navigating to this particular fold and they’re clicking on so many features, etc. But that’s not really the case.

Nobody is actually clicking in this section. Right. So from cart abandonment standpoint, from distractions standpoint, you know, let’s say there’s too much stuff on that page, I can actually understand with VWO that between the different elements that I have on my page, between the different images that I have on my page, which image is getting the higher number of clicks. Are they even interacting with the images or not? Now we will talk a little about the 3rd challenge, which has to do with user experience. Right?

Now when it comes to user experience, there could be multiple reasons why, people are hesitating to make their purchase. Right? And one of the reasons that we understand that people are not able to move forward is to do with complex navigation. The funnel is not very clear. They’re stuck with multiple options. They don’t know how to navigate from one point to the other.

Now the thing is there could be a number of challenges that we have to solve when it comes to user experience. And it is really hard to point out where exactly are you losing your revenue, because of one specific design issue. Is it because of the checkout flow itself? There could be multiple reasons. But the key to narrowing it down is to run extensive experiments on a permutation of user cohorts.

The better you understand your audience, the better you’ll have an idea of what they really need, what are they struggling with. And then you can deliver those experiences, based on their requirements according to that. Over here, if I have to understand, like, multiple users coming on my website, some people are coming from Facebook, some people are coming from other websites. There are organic users, there are search traffic, etc. The first thing that I wanna do in order to optimize user experiences is to understand who is my ICP, who are my high-performing cohorts, and who are my low-performing cohorts.

And then based on that, I want to deliver a personalized experience for those particular cohorts, for the ones that are already performing high, I want to maximize their performances. And for the ones who are not performing at an optimal level or not converting at an optimal level, I want to understand what are they struggling with. And, again, I’ll just take your attention back to the VWO dashboard on how easily this could be achieved. So there’s a setting in VWO, which allows you to run experiments and different messaging and personalization options you know, based on the audience that you’re trying to connect with. So let me go here. And this is the option that I was talking about.

So instead of running a campaign directly for everybody who’s coming to the website, you can actually choose your audience. Who do you wish to run this particular campaign for? Is it direct traffic? Is it social traffic? Is it mobile, or desktop traffic?

So there are extensive options for you to work with over here. Depending on what you identify through your analytical tool, and once you know who’s your high-performing cohort, you can actually target those cohorts using these segmentation capabilities in VWO. There are also some additional options to work with. Right? For example, you can target people based on different landing pages that they’re coming from.

You can target people from different traffic sources.  For example, direct search, referral email in organic, etc. Then you can do some more advanced level personalization using these cohorts’ locations. This is very important today.

I work with a lot of companies based in Australia, Southeast Asia, etc., and they always would like to run campaigns based on people from where they’re coming from. So let’s say if I’m targeting only people coming from Sydney, I can target people not only at a country level but also at a city level. For example, And one sec. There you go.

So this is one powerful option to use when it comes to delivering personalized experience. I don’t want to show generic content to people coming from all across the globe. Right? Rather, I want to run personalized experiences, to people meeting a specific condition and coming from a specific cohort. And, again, this can be also applied to stuff like cross-selling and other product recommendations and there are, like, unlimited capabilities here.

The idea is to make sure that you’re delivering only relevant experiences to the audience, whose behavior you’ve already analyzed. So you have an understanding of who’s converting and how. Now it’s mostly about delivering the right experiences based on what you observe, in the last analysis of yours. So those are the segmentation capabilities that we were talking about moving forward. I think those are the top challenges that we sort of wanted to cover in our discussion today. That is perhaps what I wanted to cover in the presentation.

If there’s one big thing I want you all to take away from this is not about the VWO products or, the features that I was showing you. It is actually about the concept and the culture of experimentation itself. People in business functions, it always seems like there’s a set of ways to do things to get the minimum results. Right?

But here, in order to set ourselves apart, we have to get creative with what we have. Right? We have to sort of do something extra. We have to go the extra mile. 

Everyone just assumes that experimentation is something you have to start when your company hits 100k visitors or 1,000,000 visitors or you have, like, a 1,000,000 of revenue that you’re making, but that isn’t true. I personally happened to work with a mix of clients from large enterprises to even small-scale businesses who have roughly 5k or 10k traffic, and they still expect to run about 3 to 4 experiments in a month. And is it actually something that has to do with what state am I in right now? Do I start testing at a specific stage when maybe I’ve matured in terms of money or in terms of the audience that I’m catering to, the answer is no.

You can actually, get started with experimentation as soon as possible because the problems, the challenges that we are discussing are competition, cart abandonment, and user experience. You cannot wait. You’re losing money every day. And therefore, it’s important. It’s extremely crucial that you test those things out as soon as possible. Right, without you testing those things, you don’t know what’s working and what is not working.

You don’t know whether you’re serving the right content, the right products, or the right pricing to your users. Right? I have personally experienced use cases like social forums. People are now taking it, a notch ahead where they want to test things like search and bottoms, and product recommendations. 

Shipping fee was just no shipping fee. All of this can actually conclude in a way that you’ll have a good understanding of what it is that your prospect really wants. I think that’s about it. It was a pretty straightforward session for today.

But if you have any questions, please let us know, and we’ll be happy to address them right away.

M:

Everyone can speak, actually. Like, it shouldn’t be an issue. We can all hear you. Or you can always, like, get in touch with us, over email, if you have any more questions. I think that kind of wraps up the session for the day Akshay, thank you so much.

I don’t know how many of you knew. Akshay was not feeling particularly well this morning, but, like, a champ he powered through. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for attending and being patient to the end, especially you, Mister Shamu. So, thank you so much once again.

Audience:

Yeah. I had one question.

AS:

Yeah.

Audience:

So I wanted to know if, he had experience in removing some distractions on the cart page itself. So the example, that he showed today was adding, telling the users that, they can have free delivery. What about removing the items from the cart page? Have you ever tried it before?

M:

Oh, yeah. And it’s actually impossible. So, Akshay, do you wanna take this one?

AS:

Absolutely. Yeah. So that’s a good question. So if you if I’m understanding this correctly, you’re trying to understand whether those distractions can also be removed, from the cart page, from the, like, the shopping cart page. Correct?

Audience:

Yes. That’s correct.

AS:

Okay. And if I may ask, is there a particular CMS that you’re using, like, Shopify or anything?

Audience:

Right now, we are using in-house. So I’m looking into different CMSs to test and compare.

AS:

Right. Okay. So, usually, in general, the answer is yes. You can always test out multiple things on the cart page itself. And when we talk about removing distractions, that is one of the bigger themes that we want to deep dive into.

So, yes, it’s doable, and the process is really simple. You just wanna pull up your cart page itself in the VWO dashboard and then start making changes using the visual editor. Drag and drop editor that we used. Okay. I hope that answers your question.

Audience:

Yes. Yes. It does.

AS:

Alright. Alright. Cool.

M:

So if anyone has any more questions, you can always get in touch with us through email. Once again, thank you so much, and we hope to see you.