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How does ABConvert work
How does ABConvert work

This article describe how our ABConvert split testing work

Jeffrey at ABConvert avatar
Written by Jeffrey at ABConvert
Updated over a week ago

Overview

On the top level, ABConvert is a A/B split testing tool that display different versions of your store to the customer at the same URL.

Let says there are 100 users come in, direct to the same product page or click an URL on your ad.

Assuming you are testing two version with 50/50 traffic split, 50% of them will see the version A of your store, and 50% of them will see the variant B of your store.

After a period of time, you can compare with version perform better by looking at data such as conversion rate or profit.

ABConvert is a tool that perform:

  1. Create different version for your store. E.g. price, product content, and shipping rate

  2. Split traffic based on percentage set

  3. Display different version.

  4. Collect data

  5. Display data in a easy-to-read way

All of these tasks are handled by us, all you need to do is to spend 1 mins to set up a price test.

Implementation

In this section, we will take about the implementation of different component we mentioned.

Traffic split

In all of our tests, we implement traffic split by following these steps:

  1. Assign a random seed to a user

  2. Store the seed in user browser through local storage

  3. Display different variant based on the seed

This approach can be able to handle revisit user and make sure user will only see the same version of your store through out their user journey.

Create different version

We rely on different technique for different test.

Price test & Content test

There are two ways to implement price test:

  1. Duplicate variant (default for price test)

  2. Duplicate product

Duplicate variant

For duplicate variant method, we duplicate your product variant with different price, and use our script to hide variants, change product prices in collection and home page.

The good things of this approach is you don't have to worry about issues such as reviews or fulfilment.

However, the downside of duplicate variant is there might be potential conflict with themes or third party apps. Thus, we offer a dedicated theme check to ensure things are taken care

of.

Also, if you have products that have more than 50 variants, then due to the shopify's constraint (no more than 100 variants for a product), you can't use this method.

Duplicate product

For duplicate product, we duplicate your product with different price, and use our script to direct your product page visit to different version, and change prices in collection and home page.

The good things of this approach is it's highly compatible with all theme and you can do even more change on the duplicate product.

The downside will be there might be fulfilment issue, and sales channel issues.

Shipping test

We use Carrier Service API to perform shipping test. For user with store that has a Shopify plan lower than Advanced Shopify, you can reach out the Shopify Support to enable carrier service.

Noted that we can only set the rate that get from our Carrier Service API endpoint, therefore it's not possible to test rate that are getting from other Carrier Service API.

Analytics

We collect data for your test to make decision on the data.

There are the data we collect:

  1. View (Visitor)

  2. Add to cart

  3. Checkout

  4. Order

  5. Sales (Revenue)

In order to accommodate store with different traffic distribution, we have two version of above data. User can switch the version in the analytics dashboard by selecting "Data source"

  1. Visitor based

  2. Product view based

Visitor based data

In this version, each visitor can at most contribute to one visitor, add to cart, checkout and order for a test.

For example, if a visitor visit your store and click add to cart for five product, the visitor amount will be added 1 and add to cart amount will also be added 1.

This version of data is more suitable for stores that have more traffic in home page and collection page or stores that has many products.

Product view based data

In this version, each product view can at most contribute to one visitor, add to cart, checkout and order for a test.

For example, if a visitor view three product and add two product to cart, the view amount will be added 3 and add to cart will added 2.

This version of data can capture the exact effect for changes of a product, and is more suitable for stores with fewer products.

Conclusion

ABConvert offer you a really easy to use solution to AB test your store.

We handle a lot of work under the hood, and all you need to do is spend a minutes to set up then you can enjoy the benefit from AB testing.

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