Picture of Little Shop by Theodore C

One month ago something big happened: WooThemes, the company behind WooCommerce joined Automattic. Just take a look at how Matt Mullenweg described WooThemes and what this partnership means to the WordPress ecosystem:

For years, we’ve been working on democratizing publishing (…) Now, we want to make it easy for anyone to sell online independently, without being locked into closed, centralized services — to enable freedom of livelihood along with freedom of expression.

In the past few years, WooCommerce really distinguished itself in its field. Just like WordPress as a whole, it developed a robust community around its software, and its products meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

WooCommerce is an incredible platform for building e-commerce shops on WordPress. Just take a look at WooCommerce’s statistics and you’ll quickly realize how impressive it is: WooCommerce has been downloaded over eight million times and it has over 1 million active installations.

[tweet “WooCommerce has been downloaded +8,000,000 times and it has over 1,000,000 active installations”]

We, the Nelio team, are very interested in offering the most powerful A/B Testing service for WordPress. So far, we have accomplished some amazing milestones (with Nelio A/B Testing you can split test almost any possible element in WordPress, such as headlines, pages, themes, widgets, custom post types…) and during the past year we’ve added tons of improvements to our plugin. Yet, one thing was missing… e-commerce support! Well, I’m very happy to tell you that this is not the case anymore! Nelio A/B Testing 4.2 is out and it finally includes support for WooCommerce!

Nelio A/B Testing and WooCommerce

As you may already know, WooCommerce is a huge e-commerce platform for WordPress, with an incredible ecosystem of plugins that extend its base functionality. Many of you are using this platform and told us you’d love to have some support from our tool, so that you can test your online shop and get more sales. Well, we’ve listened to your requests and we’ve finally added support for WooCommerce in Nelio!

One of the most interesting areas for running A/B tests is the e-commerce world. From our point of view (and because of your comments), we decided that the development of an e-commerce-oriented set of experiments was the right move. Nelio A/B Testing 4.2 is a first step towards something that will be much, much bigger! So, are you ready for starting to test your products and increase your sales?

[tweet “Nelio A/B Testing now supports WooCommerce! It’s time to test your products and increase your sales.”]

Nelio A/B Testing

Native Tests for WordPress

Use your WordPress page editor to create variants and run powerful tests with just a few clicks. No coding skills required.

Product Summary Testing

One of the most difficult tasks with online shops is presenting the products you sell. The name, description, and image of your products play an important role in catching the attention of your visitors. The more appealing a product is, the more likely it is that your visitors will purchase it.

WooCommerce Product Split Testing
WooCommerce Product Split Testing

With this idea in mind, Nelio presents a new kind of A/B experiment named Product Summary Testing. This experiment lets you test alternative combinations of name, short description, and featured image (what we call a “Product Summary”) of any WooCommerce product quickly and easily, without the help of designers or web developers. Once you’ve setup these combinations in WordPress, Nelio A/B Testing will clearly show you which one is better at increasing the number of completed orders containing said product.

Screenshot of the User Interface for creating alternative product summaries. As you can see, you can quickly change the name, description, and featured image of the tested product.
Screenshot of the User Interface for creating alternative product summaries. As you can see, you can quickly change the name, description, and featured image of the tested product.

Order Tracking

One of the most important goals in the e-commerce world is to sell more products. Testing several versions of a page (or product, or theme, or widgets…) to see which one drives more sells is a must for every growth hacker. How can you do that in Nelio? Until recently, you had to use some workarounds for tracking purchases in Nelio. For instance, you could track a user clicking on the “Add to Cart” button of a certain product (using click actions), or you could redirect visitors to a thank-you page after a purchase was completed and track that thank-you page. Not anymore!

Nelio A/B Testing can now track Product Purchases in WooCommerce. Regardless of the type of experiment you’re running, you can track actual purchases of certain products in your WooCommerce shop. Using a simple, yet powerful, interface, you can add the relevant product (or products) in your experiment so that, whenever an order containing that product is completed, Nelio shows a conversion. Super easy, right?

Product Purchase Conversion Action
Product Purchase Conversion Action

Other Improvements

Last, but not least, I wanted to show you a few updates and improvements we’ve included in this version of our plugin. I hope you like them!

New User Interface for the Results Page

If you’re like me, you probably love looking at the results of your experiments and analyzing which alternative converts the best. We’ve completely redesigned from scratch the results page, offering a clearer and more informative layout:

New General Information Tab in Results Page (Nelio A/B Testing 4.2)
This screenshot shows the new results page, which is organized in three tabs. The General tab contains all the relevant information of your test, so that a quick glance can tell you everything you need.

As you can see, the user interface is now organized in three different tabs:

  • General Tab. All the relevant information you need to know, at a glance. Check who’s winning, how confident we are of the results, the duration of the experiment, the performance of each alternative… everything that matters to you is available here.
  • Alternatives Tab. This tab contains further information about every single alternative you created. From there, you’ll be able to edit an alternative, view it, or apply it with a single click once the experiment is no longer running.
  • Conversion Actions Tab. Finally, the heart of Nelio: its conversion actions. This tab contains all the conversion actions you’ve defined for the currently-active goal*.
    * You can change the goal using the “target” icon located at the upper-right corner of the user interface, next to the “Stop” button.

…and more!

  • Conversion Actions Sorting. When creating new experiments, you can sort your conversion actions easily just by drag-and-dropping them.
  • More Visual. We’ve added new icons in the Creation/Edition user interface. From now on, conversion actions are easier to identify and insert.
  • Issues Resolved. We’ve identified that some servers returned a “414 Request-URI Too Long” status code when adding a too long utm_referrer GET parameter. We’ve modified the plugin so that the param is only included before syncing to Google Analytics, but it’s never sent to your WordPress server.

Time to update, folks!

If you haven’t updated your plugin yet, go ahead and do it right now! All these improvements are waiting for you 🙂

Finally, just one more thing: we’ll be adding more and more WooCommerce-related features to our plugin. So, if you have any specific suggestions or ideas, share them with us and we’ll include them in our development roadmap. I hope that we can work together so that we can deliver not only the service you deserve, but the service you need!

Featured image by Theodore C.

10 responses to “Split Test your WooCommerce Shop with Nelio A/B Testing”

  1. Jacob Mathias Avatar
    Jacob Mathias

    Such a great plugin, but a letdown with Woocommerce. There’s no ability to change the product description, pricing, additional images. Changing the short description, image, and title one small part of a huge equation. https://wpabtesting.wpengine.com/three-growth-hacks-for-ab-testing/

    1. David Aguilera Avatar

      Hi Jacob!

      Thank you very much for your comment. We know that the current version of our plugin only includes one type of WooCommerce experiment, but I want you to know that we’re working on more. Soon we’ll release a new version of Nelio (5.0) which will ease third-party integrations and, with it, we’ll take WooCommerce support to the next level! 😀 I’m very excite about what’s coming 😉

      Best,

      1. Ashley Masen Avatar
        Ashley Masen

        Any update to when version 5.0 and these feature sets are coming out?

        1. David Aguilera Avatar

          Hi Ashley,

          Thanks for getting in touch. We started to work on Nelio A/B Testing 5.0, but we decided to stall the project until WP REST API is completed. In order to implement all the new tests we wanted to include in our plugin, we had to redesign its architecture from scratch. However, the REST API will probably change the way themes and WordPress work, so we believed that it’d be better if we just wait to see how things evolve before reimplementing our plugin from scratch.

          Regards,
          David

  2. Steven Avatar
    Steven

    The biggest things I want to test are pricing and shipping options.

    For example: Testing Free Shipping vs. Fixed $2.95 shipping (for US orders only), vs. Free Shipping over $X… and combining some of those with price increases (e.g. Free shipping combined with higher product prices).

    1. David Aguilera Avatar

      You’re absolutely right, Steven. The possibilities WooCommerce offers are huge but, unfortunately, we had to shift our focus for a while.

      Lately, we’ve been working on improving the overall user experience and performance of our plugin, as well as helping our customers to get the most out of their websites. As soon as we have more man power, we’ll implement new tests in Nelio A/B Testing.

      Best,
      David

        1. David Aguilera Avatar

          Unfortunately, no updates.

      1. Bartjan Avatar
        Bartjan

        I’m wondering if this has been implemented yet?

        1. David Aguilera Avatar

          Not yet! We’ve been working on Nelio Content lately, and we didn’t have much time to address WooCommerce support in Nelio A/B Testing.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I have read and agree to the Nelio Software Privacy Policy

Your personal data will be located on SiteGround and will be treated by Nelio Software with the sole purpose of publishing this comment here. The legitimation is carried out through your express consent. Contact us to access, rectify, limit, or delete your data.