Dear E-Commerce Sites, A Traffic Spike is Approaching. You Better Be Testing.

The holiday season is around the corner, and most e-commerce websites will start to see the annual spike in site traffic.  Last year saw continued growth in online holiday shopping, especially for shoppers making purchases from mobile devices, and this season seems all too likely to surpass last year’s in holiday dollars spent online.  Are you ready to make the most of it?  We are here to help.

An Opportunity Not to Miss

Times of high traffic are optimal for website optimization efforts with A/B testing and multivariate testing. The potential speed of collecting results is unparalleled and the chance to act on winning results within days and start increasing revenue is not to be missed. You can run a test on Monday and Tuesday and easily use Optimizely to allocate 100% of the traffic to the the winning experience on Wednesday. For example, making the special price offer text green instead of red across product

pages may represent only half a percentage improvement in revenue per visitor. Over the course of the holiday season, this small increase may represent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional revenue. With a testing tool nimble enough to make subtle and drastic changes across the entire site within minutes, huge increases in conversions and revenue are attainable.

More New Visitors, More Incentive to Test

The increase in site traffic will certainly be a mix of new and returning visitors.  The prospect of new visitors is an incentive to start A/B testing because every new visitor is a potential return visitor. The holiday season is a prime opportunity to convert lots of new visitors and make them want to return again. Testing when you have more of these new visitors can quickly give you the most accurate picture of a better site experience and give you insight to apply to further tests after the holiday rush.

Code Freeze? No Problem.

Code freezes are no longer a deterrent to testing during the holiday season because Optimizely’s testing platform does not alter your existing site code. Every variation is contained in the Optimizely snippet, a single line of code placed in the head tag of your global header. Even if your site is locked down, you can still target and test all of your site visitors and increase the likelihood of turning them into customers.