[aresant]

Most A/B testing will fail when you're testing the wrong elements.

I have a challenge for you.

The examples you list are "top" of the funnel tests: buttons for engagement, a homepage redesign.

But when I go deeper into your funnel like your pricing grid page and cart checkout page, I see lots of tweaks that, in my experience, can drive the significant gains that you are looking for.

I'm going to use this page as my starting point, by way of example:

http://www.jitbit.com/hosted-helpdesk/purchase/

When I click order now on the "Startup" plan and get myself to the cart page here was my experience:

a) The load time on click to page load for checkout was >3 seconds for me. You can get some idea of why here http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ or here http://www.webpagetest.org/

b) Your design changes drastically between those pages, breaking the user's flow and attention. 37signals products do a nice job of maintaining conformity between pricing grid to checkout as an example.

c) You're treating a SAAS checkout like a product checkout - asking about quantity, list price, etc. What % of your users add multiple services to the cart? Can you keep this in more of a flow?

d) You have no visible security certificate on the page at all, when in fact even the placement of your security certificate on checkout can make a drastic impact in conversion eg http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/proper-placemen...

e) Yes, some people are still confused by what a CVV2 / CVC2 code is and displaying a visual explanation can help your conversions.

So my challenge for you is focus on the RIGHT area on your page to test - your highest intent traffic and I think you will find that a lot fewer cycles need be wasted and A/B testing remains one of the highest ROI activities your org can embark on.

[m4xt3r]

Thanls a lot for taking your time to write this awesome comment!

The thing is we have very little control over the checkout area, since it is hosted by our payment provider and we cannot run tests there. We are not happy about it and we will move to Stripe as soon as it will be available outside of the US.

Really, thnaks a lot for this. I will look into this right now, maybe we could fix some of those.

EDIT: We've removed the quantity field from the SaaS products, never thought of that before, thanks.

[jordo37]

I would also highly encourage you to look at Balanced or Stripe for checkout - the integration isn't too bad, the pricing is great and you have full control over the look and feel of your checkout pages.

Also, great tip on the CVV2 info, realized we didn't have it in our system either.

[MichaelGG]

Braintree is available outside the US, and they offer the client-side JS to you can control the experience and dodge PCI requirements.

[aresant]

My pleasure and hope that it helps!

If you guys are doing decent scale on sales it's 100% worth building your own checkout process so you can really drill down your high-intent traffic, or at least testing stripe / etc (or whatever other solutions are available in your market)

[hackiavelli]

I'm always resistant to putting up "trust logos" on a website. It's like training users to fall for phishing scams: you can trust me because I say you can trust me. Sure, the user can click the link to the verifying site, but how many do? Of those, how many would be able to spot it if you were redirecting them to a look-alike you set up?

I'd much rather train users to trust their SSL connection based on what their browser says rather than what I do.