If you don't know what A/B-testing is: it's basically having two versions of something online and seeing what performs best. This can be two landing pages, two videos, or two webshops. Most traditional webshops don't let you do this, or you have to do it by creating two entirely separate accounts. Oof. Sayl Retail is different.

Why should I invest time in A/B-testing?

If you notice one of your two (or three, or four) webshops is clearly outperforming the rest, this means you have found an avenue to more revenue. Continuous A/B-testing may be your road to ever greater commercial success.

Conversely, it also allows you to detect what promotional actions, items or calls to action aren't really working for you. You can make these tests very subtle, e.g. by creating very similar webshops with minute differences in copy or with different product images. This lets you get to the bottom of what details matter for your commercial success.

Won't this take too much effort for what it's worth?

Changing a few lines of copy or creating two different Facebook Ads barely takes a few hours, and since you probably keep tabs on your revenue sources already, you can run A/B-tests at least every month (and preferably every two weeks) with minimal effort.

Sayl Retail helps you in this, by the way – it's already designed with these kinds of actions in mind, so you don't have to re-upload every product, let alone every version of it. It adheres to best practices of A/B-testing by letting you showcase special products or promotions and linking visitors to your shop straight from an Ad, lowering the risk of people abandoning your page or not buying.

What do I need to keep in mind?

The quick and dirty answer: everything. But the longer answer is: it depends on how much time and effort you're willing to put in. Here's a list, divided by effort and time:

Quick wins

• Copy differences between shops
• Different pictures
• Differences in number of products
• Pricing tweaks

Medium effort

• Different shops for different ads
• Ads that target more detailed demographics
• Different layout schemes
• Different channels (e.g. Facebook and e-mail campaigns)

Large effort

• Sub-branding or off-branding
• Experimenting with different e-commerce platforms
• Testing different language versions

In each case, your action flow will be something like this:

• Hypothesis: I will sell more if I use black-and-white pictures
• Test: set up a second, identical Sayl Retail shop, but with b/w-pictures
• Check: send a link to half your customer base with shop 1, the other half gets shop 2
• Results: is there a difference in revenue from both versions?

How would Sayl Retail help me more than another e-commerce platform?

As said before, most other e-commerce platforms simply don't allow A/B-testing, or do it in a very convoluted way. But other than having this functionality, Sayl Retail easily lets you tweak design parameters (color schemes, logos, button text, etc.) and already comes in five different languages out of the box (English, French, Spanish, German and Dutch).

In addition, you have an analytics module that lets you track visits and buys, and you can send out automated mails to your customers via Sayl Retail to see what kind of information is a good call to action(CTA) and what isn't. Since it's optimized to look just as good on desktop as on mobile, the native difference between e-commerce numbers on both platforms (mobile traditionally has more visitors but less buyers online) should shrink, too.

Beyond the shop

A/B-testing isn't just something that's limited to e-commerce. You can experiment with it for your landing pages, social media posts and general e-mailings as well. It's more about adopting this mindset of iterative improvement than it is about checking boxes and looking at data.

And even if you loathe analyzing charts and crunching numbers (which is easy these days, thanks to a vast number of analytics apps out there), you can always directly ask your customers, friends, co-workers and family to take a look at what you do and get their honest opinion. Customers tend to follow their gut, and you need understand that gut.