Now that Shopify has finally deprecated checkout.liquid and provided more customization options through Checkout Extensibility (not to mention the recent acquisition of Checkout Blocks capabilities for Plus merchants) the hot topic is how to leverage these new capabilities for CRO (conversion rate optimization).
I caught up with Isaac Folmsbee to get his insider take on whatâs now and whatâs next in checkout optimization. Isaacâs the technical lead at Udundi, the development agency behind Compose, an A/B testing app that integrates directly into your Shopify theme (down to your settings) and the only pay-as-you-go tool for experimentation.
Check out the full video "vodcast" here, or jump to segments with summarized transcript below:
Checkout testing with Profiles
Q: Now that Checkout Extensibility supports more customization within Shopify checkout, what should merchants know about A/B testing extensible elements?
A: Traditionally, how people have been able to test in their checkout is using third party tools such as Compose to be able to inject or to hide certain parts of the checkout.
But moving forward, Checkout Extensibility will somewhat lock down how you can do testing (ironically). And so, Shopify is planning on enabling something closer to split path testing through Checkout Profiles in the near future (perhaps by Q4 of this year).
Checkout Profiles are similar to themes in your store. You can have multiple versions of your checkout experience for different purposes and send certain visitors to profile A and others to B based on rules, or split test them head-to-head.
For instance, maybe you want to test an upsell, or you want to test some messaging in your form to ensure adding it doesnât increase abandonment, youâd create a separate profile for that.
Checkout testing and upsells
Q: In your day-to-day agency work, what kind of checkout tests are clients requesting (or are you recommending)?
A: The big thing for clients is they want to increase their conversion rates as much as they can, especially in the checkout, while getting a little bit more out of the purchase, whether it be an upsell or add-ons.
The biggest thing from our agencyâs point of view is preventing people from leaving the checkout. Weâve noticed over time is that anything that distracts the customer from making that final purchase should be avoided.
Q: Thereâs always debate around whether cart and checkout cross-sells introduce too much friction or distraction. Do you have any wisdom to share from your testing experience?
A: Yeah, unfortunately itâs quite nuanced and depends on your customers. There are some brands where we've tested doing upsells or cross sells and have noticed a small uplift.
It does increase conversions and increases average order value for some brands, but for others it's just too much distraction, and it doesn't fit with the branding itself. Itâs just something that most merchants are going to need to test for themselves.
You're not going to see a 50% increase or anything, but depending on your customers, you could see a few percentage points up or down.
Upsell test winner insights
Q: When you look at the bulk of your winning cart or checkout tests, do they share certain attributes or conditions that we could call best practice?
A: Yeah, the biggest one is definitely removing friction. If Iâm trying to put in an upsell -- is this increasing friction? Is this something that my customer is going to think twice about what purchase they're making?
There are also some things that just overall end up being better most of the time, especially on mobile such as removing additional information. It can make sense to have some small add-ons or small content blocks for, say showing messaging or showing upsells but you need to be careful not to overdo it.
And there's a point of diminishing returns. Maybe you've added one upsell and you've seen a pretty big uplift in the average order value, adding three more isn't going to increase it threefold.
And this holds true for most of the merchants that we've tested with, usually you can get more conversions from your checkout by adding something but the question is what, depending on your brand.
Q: Do you have a âmost shocking resultâ from your experience?
A: One thing that did shock us was we had a client who had a loyalty program that has a way to redeem points to get money off your purchase.
We made the mistake of implementing (without A/B testing) a way that customers who weren't logged in could log into their account from inside checkout, and then proceed to redeem those points.
Our thought process originally was that this would increase conversions because people would see that they could earn or redeem points in their order, but we revisited it several months later and A/B tested removing it to see if that had any effect.
Removing the login significantly increased conversions. We interpreted this as customers likely went to log in and forgot their password, or simply got distracted from the checkout at that point.
A note on Shop Pay
âForgot passwordâ friction is something that Shop Pay may address. Shopify reports that conversion is higher when Shop Pay is presented as an option. Maybe due to a sense of trust in Shopify or by removing friction of filling fields.
And Shop Pay accounts donât have passwords, theyâre based on email alone, so every time you go to sign in, they send you a code that you use to sign in.
Checkout blocks
Q: What are your thoughts on Shopifyâs recent acquisition of Checkout Blocks (a no code app with ready to use checkout components that will soon become native to all Shopify Plus accounts)?
A: I think overall, Shopifyâs acquisition of Checkout Blocks really opens the doors for smaller merchants on Plus to be able to add more features and functionality to checkout as you won't need a full in-house dev team to build these things out anymore.
But also, it will be helpful for larger merchants because it will solve for some of the simple things that allows developers to work on more pressing matters.
Once Shopify enables profile-to-profile testing, merchants will be able to set up split path tests using different checkout block components. For example, at Compose we see a lot of merchants adding gift notes or additional shipping information blocks to checkout.
Personalizing Shopify checkout
Q: What about checkout personalization? Is Shopify moving in that direction?
A: I think there's still quite a lot of opportunity for Shopify to enable personalization for merchants.
Iâd love to see Shopify provide the ability to serve different checkout profiles to different customer segments. For example, you could segment customers from France or the United States, or customers that relate to a specific part of your brand.
If Shopify provides developers with tools to build these things out for merchants, that would be huge.
Q: Do you think that Shopify would develop that capability itself, or the first step would be via third party apps?
A: Weâll have to wait and see once profiles come out, if they give third party tools APIs to be able to serve these different profiles.
Maybe not immediately, because it will take us developers a little bit of time to implement it, but I think profiles will provide enough flexibility to be able to enable this sort of personalization combined with A/B testing.
If not, we'll have to petition to Shopify to give us a bit more tools to enable these sorts of features, but fingers crossedâŠ
đïž Thanks to Isaac and Compose for sharing these insights on testing in the Shopify checkout đïž
If you want an A/B testing tool that integrates directly with your Shopify theme and its native settings (including upcoming Checkout Profiles) check out the Compose Shopify app, now available in the App Store đ„ł