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What works in e-commerce – A meta-analysis of online experiments [pdf]

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Re: What works in e-commerce – A meta-analysis of online experiments [pdf]

#81

Post by accountyaccount »

Iv wrote: post #76
accountyaccount wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AirBnB does a lot of these — and they aren't necessarily dick moves when you're looking at something with limited availability. If 1,000 people have looked at an AirBnB listing, it does actually make sense to book faster than a property 3 people were looking at.

It makes sense when the information is accurate and complete. I tend to not trust companies to do the right thing when they have an incentive to do the opposite. For instance, do you count people "watching" this property through suggestions while they are browsing another one? Do you count people who clicked it but went back after checking the address? How long before you do not consider a person "watching" anymore?…

Fair. Personally I'll occasionally look at the source to see if there's any obvious trickery going on. It would be interesting to do a study to see what people consciously think about that type of thing.

Re: What works in e-commerce – A meta-analysis of online experiments [pdf]

#83

Post by [deleted] »

pbowyer wrote: post #59
nik736 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply false. There are always categories or "side"-categories that can be highly profitable and big stores only care about as a side business (small category in their store). Being a small category for a huge store means they don't care about that category too much but it doesn't mean there isn't a lot of cash to be made. I've helped several companies to build an online store that did exactly that and they ar…

Can you give any examples of small categories? I can't think of any, let alone get my brain round what kind of thing they would be.

[deleted]

Re: What works in e-commerce – A meta-analysis of online experiments [pdf]

#84

Post by antisthenes »

nik736 wrote: post #39
cylinder wrote: post #26

Well, running a rudimentary eBay store you realize these things help pretty quickly, but it's good to have data. However... Starting a new e-commerce property? Good luck finding traffic in anything profitable. Amazon and other Giants dominate search rankings so I'm not sure how you will find your traffic unless you create a new niche. Maybe you're a thought leader in a hobbyist space, that can work... But you're not…

That's simply false. There are always categories or "side"-categories that can be highly profitable and big stores only care about as a side business (small category in their store). Being a small category for a huge store means they don't care about that category too much but it doesn't mean there isn't a lot of cash to be made. I've helped several companies to build an online store that did exactly that and they ar…

5 digit revenue could be as low as $10,000 a month.

When you factor in cost of goods and labor, what's the net income on that $120k/year? An educated guess would put it below the median wage for the country.

How many of them have at least $1,000,000/year revenue?

Re: What works in e-commerce – A meta-analysis of online experiments [pdf]

#85

Post by nocoder »

Very interesting thanks for sharing. As someone working in e-commerce, I was smiling when I saw some of them but it is frustrating on how often these ineffective experiments are repeated.

I would have loved to see the cut of performance by industry/sector. My hunch is some of the things would work really well in travel but not as well in others especially low involvement categories and categories with lower average selling price. It would also be interesting to know the average duration of these A/B tests, I think some of things like scarcity and urgency will have larger effect in the shorter time duration vs others like UI changes which will take a while to produce substantial results, mostly because customers will have to learn new behaviours. Product recommendations is interesting because it is notoriously difficult to get them right and feel they tend to work better in long tail categories like media vs. head heavy categories like mobiles or laptops. They may also not work well in categories where brand influence is high and are generally high involvement and high cost.

Re: What works in e-commerce – A meta-analysis of online experiments [pdf]

#86

Post by nik736 »

antisthenes wrote: post #84
nik736 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply false. There are always categories or "side"-categories that can be highly profitable and big stores only care about as a side business (small category in their store). Being a small category for a huge store means they don't care about that category too much but it doesn't mean there isn't a lot of cash to be made. I've helped several companies to build an online store that did exactly that and they ar…

5 digit revenue could be as low as $10,000 a month. When you factor in cost of goods and labor, what's the net income on that $120k/year? An educated guess would put it below the median wage for the country. How many of them have at least $1,000,000/year revenue?

If you think about that these are only side gigs without much labor involved (mostly drop shipping) and made on a tight budget, even $10k would be good money.

Launch such a store every month and you have $120k MRR after 12 months.

Re: What works in e-commerce – A meta-analysis of online experiments [pdf]

#87

Post by x2398dh1 »

tyingq wrote: post #68
rubyfan wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just tried it out, wow does that feel slimy. The waiting queue felt totally fake and the "while you were waiting these sold out thing" was obnoxious. Of course the psychological aspects might have worked differently if I were actually there to buy tickets for an event I really wanted to go to.

The worst is the bottom banner complete bullshit of "The website is experiencing heavy traffic - This may result in reduced performance" For the "too lazy to navigate, add to cart", a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/o8zUP1u.png Edit: Offtopic, but Floyd Mayweather vs Connor McGregor in a "boxing only" match, with no kicks, submissions, wrestling, etc, allowed? Who thinks that would be fun to watch? Ugh, that's going t…

I continued navigating through to the actual point of purchase. The default quantity of tickets selected was, "1" and there was a warning message which said, "About to sell out - only 2 tickets left." When I selected 5 tickets, that message changed right in front of my eyes to, "About to sell out - only 6 tickets left," and so on.

Perhaps they really are experiencing heavy traffic...I have no real way of knowing that for sure. But when you program a robot to scam me, at least put some effort in, right?

Re: What works in e-commerce – A meta-analysis of online experiments [pdf]

#88

Post by ryanckulp »

gumboshoes wrote: post #33
Iv wrote: post #25

tl;dr: The 3 items possibly statistically significant are: - Saying there are just a handful items left in stock (+2.9% revenue per client) - Saying other people are watching this product (+2.3%) - Time limited offer (+1.5%) I did not see mention of combining these factors. I doubt the gains are cumulative. My main takeaway is that most optimizations are not worthy if you have the opportunity to spend your time/money…

Whether they're dick moves is all in how you handle them. In the nonprofit world, these things are well-known and tend to be handled with finesse and even grace. 1. It's not just about items in stock. "Our SomeNonprofit membership program has just 10 places left at the platinum level, where you receive the following benefits..." 2. Social proof is more than just what people are watching. "Fans of SomeNonprofit donate…

are you still involved w/ non-profits?

we offer our social proof platform 100% free to all charities: https://www.usefomo.com

ping me (ryan@usefomo.com) for a free-forever account, no strings.

Re: What works in e-commerce – A meta-analysis of online experiments [pdf]

#89

Post by ryanckulp »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #52
ourmandave wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hotels.com uses #2 ("X people have looked at hotels in this area in the last hour.") and it feels like a dick move.

Why is that a dick move if it's true?

what's unfortunate is we'll never know if hotels.com is true, because they built the component in-house.

the use of 3rd party platforms increases trust, ie restaurants using Yelp vs self-hosted text boxes.

Re: What works in e-commerce – A meta-analysis of online experiments [pdf]

#90

Post by ryanckulp »

accountyaccount wrote: post #81
Iv wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense when the information is accurate and complete. I tend to not trust companies to do the right thing when they have an incentive to do the opposite. For instance, do you count people "watching" this property through suggestions while they are browsing another one? Do you count people who clicked it but went back after checking the address? How long before you do not consider a person "watching" anymore?…

Fair. Personally I'll occasionally look at the source to see if there's any obvious trickery going on. It would be interesting to do a study to see what people consciously think about that type of thing.

my company would happily fund a study like this.

we rely on these strategies "working" for our customers, in order to exist.

i'll wager that when consumers know a "widget" or live notification is provided by an external source, they trust it more than when the build is internal.

ping me (ryan@usefomo.com) if you want to get involved!

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