Increasing conversions on PrestaShop: A/B tests done right

You drive traffic to your PrestaShop store, you pay for campaigns, but orders grow less than you expect. Before increasing your ad budget, it pays to work on conversions: getting a higher share of the visitors you already have to buy. A/B tests are the right tool for the job, as long as you use them methodically and don't trust gut feelings.

Before testing: find out where you lose customers

An A/B test answers a specific question, so the first step is finding the right question. Open your analytics and reconstruct the funnel: how many people see the product page, how many add to cart, how many reach the checkout, how many complete the order. The point where the drop is steepest is the natural candidate for your first experiment.

In the stores we manage, the bottleneck is almost always one of these:

• product pages with poor photos or descriptions that don't answer buyers' doubts;
• shipping costs shown only at the last step of the checkout;
• a long checkout or one that forces registration;
• a mobile version that's slow or has buttons that are hard to tap.

Add the qualitative data: the questions that reach customer service before a purchase tell you exactly which information is missing from your pages. Those are ready-made test hypotheses.

What to test first on PrestaShop

Not all pages carry the same weight. It makes sense to start with the ones that get the most traffic and sit closest to the purchase, because that's where an improvement turns into orders quickly. In order of priority:

• Product page: the first photo, the order of the information, the placement of reviews, clarity on shipping times and costs.
• Cart: the free shipping threshold and how it's communicated, reassurance messages about returns and payments.
• Checkout: number of steps, guest checkout, form fields cut down to the essentials.
• Category pages: filters, default sorting, information visible in product previews.

In the websites and eCommerce projects we manage, tests on the product page and the checkout are almost always the ones that move the needle most, because they act where the customer already intends to buy and all that's needed is removing an obstacle.

How to set up a test that gives reliable answers

The basic rule is one variable at a time. If you change the photo, the title and the button together, in the end you won't know which change produced the effect. Define before you start: the hypothesis ("showing shipping costs on the product page reduces checkout abandonment"), the primary metric (completed orders, not clicks) and the minimum duration.

On duration, keep two things in mind. First: the test must cover whole weeks, weekends included, because buying behavior changes between weekdays and holidays. Second: you need enough traffic for the difference between variants to be trustworthy. If your store gets few orders per day, a classic A/B test can take months; in that case a well-documented before/after comparison is more practical, with comparable periods and a single change at a time.

On the technical side, on PrestaShop you can work with dedicated testing modules, with client-side testing tools, or with variants managed server-side. The choice depends on your traffic and on how deep the change goes: changing a piece of text is one thing, testing two checkout layouts is work that must be done carefully to avoid introducing bugs in the most delicate part of the store.

Reading the results without fooling yourself

This is what separates a useful test from one that leads you astray. The mistakes we see most often:

• Stopping the test too early. The first days are almost always noisy: one variant takes the lead and then falls back in line. Respect the duration you decided at the start.
• Testing during unusual periods. Sales, holidays and one-off campaigns change visitor behavior. Results from those periods don't hold for the rest of the year.
• Watching the wrong metric. A variant can increase clicks on the button without increasing orders. What counts is the bottom of the funnel.
• Not documenting. Keep a test log: hypothesis, dates, variants, outcome. After a year it becomes the store's institutional memory and prevents you from repeating experiments you've already run.

One last thing: losing tests have value too. If a change that seemed obvious moved nothing, you've learned something about your customers and avoided investing more time in it.

Want help getting more out of your store?

We've been working on PrestaShop for years, between page optimization, checkout work and the technical groundwork that prepares for testing. If you want to understand where your store loses orders and which experiment to start with, take a look at our websites and eCommerce service and book a free call: we'll analyze your funnel together and tell you what we would test first.