Success Story

How ReplaceDirect Used A/B Testing To Reduce Cart Abandonment

25% Cart abandonment rate

About ReplaceDirect

ReplaceDirect, a VWO customer, is a successful Dutch ecommerce site. It’s one of the biggest retailers in the Netherlands in the field of parts and accessories for notebooks and other mobile equipment. Their main focus is on energy products like batteries and power supplies, but their product range is quite extensive.

They did an A/B test on their website for which they used VWO.

Goals

For eCommerce sites, cart abandonment is one of the most frustrating aspects of business. Visitors abandon their shopping carts, because they are unsure about additional costs, or are surprised to find out (only after entering the payment process) that they are charged more than they expected.

To prevent such surprises, ReplaceDirect informs its prospective customers at an early stage that no shipping costs will be added.

But has the customer actually leveraged or retained that information?

This is what ReplaceDirect wanted to test: Will it help reduce cart abandonment if a clear order overview is provided during the initial steps of checkout?

Tests run

Moving ahead with the test, the ReplaceDirect team tested the second step of the checkout procedure on its website. It’s the page where customers need to fill out their personal information and shipping address.

The team made several changes to the page. The most important change perhaps was the insertion of an order overview, comprising the product(s), total costs, and delivery date.

ReplaceDirect also mentioned several benefits of this page; these were changed to more relevant benefits, specifically matching this step in the order process. Finally, the layouts of the page and the form were changed to yield a cleaner look. Several fields, which were not absolutely necessary, were removed. Following are the screenshots:

Control Page

Variation Page: 25% Reduction in Cart Abandonment

Conclusion

Their new version performed significantly better, reducing cart abandonments by 25%. As a direct result of this reduction, they saw a 12% increase in sales (14% by the time of pushing all new traffic to the new page).

ReplaceDirect says they expected the new version to perform better, but an increase that high turned out to be a pleasant surprise. It’s always nice to have a 14% increase in sales, without releasing any new products or without spending money on ways to get more traffic to the website.

When we asked them if they had any lessons for other eCommerce sites; here is what they had to say:

“Try to give the customers exactly the information they need at that particular page or section and leave out the redundant. Always put yourself in the customer’s shoes. This may not be easy so: test it!“

ReplaceDirect also had some praise for VWO:

VWO was very valuable. The ease to set up a test and real-time results made it great to work with.