5 Real Merchant Objections to Holiday Optimization

The holiday season is the riskiest time of the year to run tests on your eCommerce site, so think twice before you choose to optimize.

While learning more about your customers’ preferences is always valuable, keep in mind that A/B testing runs the risk of costing you more than these insights are worth. A simple change to the UI can cause massive impacts to CR, AOV, and RPV, which may keep you from hitting your goal for the year.

Here are 5 reasons why you may not want to optimize your eCommerce store this holiday season.

1 | “AB testing during the holidays? Way too risky.”

If there were no downsides to eCommerce optimization, everyone would be doing it – and there is certainly plenty of risk involved.

Trial and error is a part of the learning experience when it comes to AB testing, so get ready to take a few hits when your experiments start running.

Keep in mind that changing your customer experience could potentially have disastrous consequences, especially when you don’t have enough data to distinguish what converts and what doesn’t.

2 | “I don’t want to lose money optimizing!”

Everything on your site, from the design, to the navigation, all the way down to the CTA buttons, has an effect on your revenue metrics.

Even the smallest changes to these elements can cause significant ripples throughout your site that affect customer behavior. Are you prepared to wager a safe, profitable holiday season for potential revenue growth? Aside from budget considerations, are you ready to adopt continuous optimization in your overall strategy?

3 | “What if the treatments break my site?”

Imagine it’s the peak of the holiday season and your site goes down – can you think of anything worse? No merchant can afford any technical issues with their site during this time, let alone a surprise that grinds all revenue to a halt.

Unfortunately, experiments breaking a site is something that happens all too often, as you can never be 100% sure how the code will interact with the treatments. Do you want to be the one responsible for your company’s site breaking at the most critical time of the year?

4 | “It’s too late in the year to begin experimenting.”

A successful optimization campaign requires careful planning, and you should do plenty of research before hiring a company to make changes to your site. Consider waiting until the start of the new year to dive in, and make sure to ask questions such as:

What obstacles are keeping my customers from converting?
Am I able to gain insights from my own data?
What can I learn from my merchant peers?
How can I make my buyer journey more personalized?
Is my company ready to try something new?

These are just a few examples, but always make sure you’re thinking outside the box.

5 | “Don’t I have to optimize all the time for it to be valuable?”

eCommerce’s best kept secret is continuous optimization. That means merchants who get the most out of testing also do it constantly, throughout the whole year.

Doing one-off testing can be costly, time-consuming, and offers little in terms of overall ROI.

As eCommerce becomes more insights-driven, merchants are going beyond AB testing and traditional optimization methods in order to learn exactly what the individual customer desires at any particular moment during their buying journey.