We recently ran an AB test for an apparel ecommerce client where we moved the “Size Guide” link up the PDP, closer to the size dropdown.
This test is interesting because CRO best practices suggest that typically, small changes yield small results, and on the surface, moving the location of a size guide link is a small change. After all, it’s auxiliary info that only a small fraction of apparel ecommerce shoppers even click on. Why would it’s position make a statistically significant difference in conversion rate?
So, if moving such a small link does make a significant difference in conversion rate, that would tell us that the size guide link may have relative importance for certain apparel ecommerce sites. For example, if a site normally has most sizes available, it may not make a difference. But if a site has many popular products that frequently have limited size availability, or they run out of certain sizes often, it may make a big difference.
In general, this means that assessing whether a feature is important and whether adjusting it qualifies as a big change or a small change may not be obvious, and definitely is not universal. A small single link can be a big deal if it’s critical to the buying decision for a large amount of users. This is store dependent and can even be product dependent.
Note: You can learn more about our CRO service for ecommerce brands here.
Details of this Size Guide AB Test for Apparel Ecommerce
In the original (how the live site was, pre-testing), the size guide link was really low on the page, in the description section. In our Variation, we moved the size guide up above the size dropdown:
Again, this is seemingly a “small” change. What percentage of users even click on the size guide in the first place? We ran Hotjar heatmaps on these product pages, and on desktop, out of 348 users, only 2 clicked the size guide link (1.65%) and on mobile, out of 1356 users tracked, only 3 (0.31%) tapped the size guide.
Results and Implications: 21% increase in conversions, 22% increase in AOV
To our surprise, variation B increased conversion rate by 21% with 96% statistical significance after 10 days. We should note that this is a lower traffic site, so both the original and variation had less than 200 conversions per variation (over 20,000 sessions per variation), so these results should be taken with a grain of salt, despite statistical significance being > 95% (See our article on stopping an AB test). The variation also showed a 22% increase in average order value (AOV). As a result revenue per session was up a whopping 46%.
So the results are noteworthy despite the low traffic.
Obviously the size guide makes more contextual sense near the size dropdown — that’s hard to argue. But in CRO, there is a principle of lowering distraction by reducing or moving links that don’t get a lot of links. So one could argue that size guide links are not used often and thus may distract from the add to cart experience and can be moved lower on the page.
This test suggests that may not be true for many apparel ecommerce sites.
Finally, we urge the reader to not interpret these results as: “So we should test the placement of every little link on our site!” That will lead to inefficient testing. Just because moving the size guide link caused an increase in conversions, AOV, and as a result, revenue per visitor, that doesn’t mean moving any small link on a PDP will do that. It means that there is evidence that the size guide link could be important to make a buying decision.
So the real questions ecommerce UX teams should be asking are: what information is important for our customers to make a buying decision (for our particular products)? And is that information in a contextually appropriate position? Is it easy to find? Could it be improved?
If you’re interested, you can learn more about our CRO service for ecommerce brands here.
Further Reading:
- Ecommerce pricing presentation test case study
- Sticky add to cart ab test case study
- Our massive mobile checkout best practices study