With A/B and multivariate testing, the biggest gains are often achieved by making big changes, like “breaking” page layouts, testing contrasting colors on calls to action, using radically different imagery (or removing images altogether) and slicing-and-dicing form fields. While you can’t always get what you want, if you try sometimes, you can get great gains from testing the right stuff

The brand constraints

Strong brands like SAP often come with branding that can limit creativity and flexibility. In this case, pages require a standard, corporate banner that takes up header space and inevitably pushes more content below the fold (wherever that may be for a user). The team had to accommodate fixed column widths, adhere to font and font size standards, work within an approved brand color scheme and select images from an approved list.

Design constraints can be a blessing in disguise, as it keeps your focus on the message of the landing page rather than look and feel. Analysis of the landing page was centered on the clarity of the value proposition, and minimization of distracting design elements that were within the control of the testers given the constraints.

The redesign

Versions ‘A’ and ‘B’ were constructed. ‘A’ featured a more prominent call-to-action (the Big Orange Button) while minimizing distractions.

‘B’ baked a conversion form into the landing page, eliminating the additional step on the control and version ‘A’.

The results

This test achieved a 32.5% boost in lead generation conversion rate with version ‘A’, and 17% lift with version ‘B’. Perhaps these numbers are as good or better as the results would have been had the team had complete freedom around testing elements.

7 tips for testing within constraints

1. Focus on clarity of the value proposition. Always, always, always start with this, and build it into headlines and body copy.
2. Don’t be afraid to flip visuals. When working with rigid templates, moving things from left to right and vice-versa can have surprising impact.
3. If images can’t be changed, try making them bigger (or remove them completely, in the case of the ‘hero shot‘)
4. Don’t be afraid to ask for permission to bend the rules. WiderFunnel did win some wiggle room on version ‘A’ from the branding team on certain elements.
5. Experiment with copy length. This is a great test branding can’t touch!
6. Experiment with number of “conversion exits” (calls-to-action within copy).
7. Experiment with button label text and position if color and size can’t be tweaked.

If you’re interested in the details of the SAP case, it’s published in full in You Should Test That and on Wider Funnel’s conversion rate optimization including formation of the hypothesis and technical implementation.

I recently asked Chris Goward, author of You Should Test That some hard-hitting conversion optimization testing questions — answers below. Chris is a pioneer of conversion rate and landing page optimization and the founder of WiderFunnel, a testing consultancy that’s worked with ecommerce brands like Google, Electronic Arts, SAP, Shutterfly and BabyAge.com.

GetElastic: The beauty of A/B testing is to slaughter sacred cows and bust through the myth of best practices. But, in your experience, are there any true “best practices” that hold true across tests? Is there anything that’s safe to call a best practice for ecommerce?

Chris: Well, it’s a safe bet that you should have some sort of checkout page…

I’m joking (a little) but, in all seriousness, I think there are some pretty well-founded “better” and “worse” ways to do things, but very little marketing and UX rules that should be enshrined as “best practices.”

I believe we are still in the early days of testing new e-commerce experiences. Innovative designers and UX architects are coming up with new experiences all the time. Some are terrible ideas and others are going to work better than our current standards. The beauty of the scientific approach is that you can kill the losers much more quickly and definitively without having to worry about them turning into sacred cows. The pace of business is too fast today to allow them to develop.

GetElastic: Aside from checkout and the home page, what pages or elements on an ecommerce site have the highest conversion potential?

Chris: We’re seeing lots of great conversion rate and profit lift with A/B tests of category pages, landing pages, PDP pages, search results templates, and site-wide elements like Persistent Calls to Action (PCTAs).

The checkout is a purely transactional area that is often not the highest priority and the home page often is too much of a political hot-potato, actually. But, we’ll test there if we have good organizational support. We just finished two home page tests for two different clients last week with big double-digit lifts on each, so they can be fun too.

GetElastic: There’s some debate around whether you should aim for a high confidence interval, or take a lower confidence in order to reduce test length. What’s your opinion on this tradeoff?

Chris: That debate happens when dealing with low traffic websites. If there isn’t a traffic constraint, there’s no downside to aiming for the 95% confidence level. But, not every website has millions of monthly visitors, so tradeoffs are needed.

This question should be a business decision when weighing the pros and cons of higher certainty with 95% confidence or more tests with 80% confidence, for example.

First, people with lower traffic sites should follow some basic rules for getting faster results:

• Limit the number of variations per test to 3-4
• Test dramatic differences
• Don’t even think about multivariate testing
• Test important insights on higher traffic pages, then validate with a simple A/B on lower traffic areas

But when you’re already following the basic principles for low traffic testing you can also experiment with lower confidence intervals.

But, you should be very cautious about doing that. The only thing worse than not testing is getting unreliable results from your tests.

The 95% confidence level will be a true result 19 times out of 20. An 80% confidence level will only be true 16 times out of 20. That’s certainly better than a gut-feeling or HiPPO approach, it’s quite a bit less accurate.

At WiderFunnel, we use a 95% confidence level as our standard benchmark for most of our clients. There are exceptions where we need to stop tests early if they’re taking too long and there’s an opportunity cost, but then we take the results as directional, not statistically significant.

GetElastic: Many CRO experts believe rotating banners on a home page is a waste of space. Do you agree?

Chris: I was the first to come out publicly against rotating home page carousels in Oct 2011. Since then, others have jumped on the bandwagon based on our data.

For us at WiderFunnel, it’s less about opinion and totally because of the tests we’ve run. We love running A/B split tests against home page rotators! They often lose badly.

GetElastic: What in your opinion is the most underrated, OR overrated metric in CRO?

Chris: You may be surprised to learn that I hate the term “conversion rate optimization” even though that is the industry we’ve pioneered. The problem is that it focuses attention on a metric rather than an outcome. We as an industry should be talking about the purpose rather than the technical details. The outcome should be “marketing optimization” or “scientific marketing” with the conversion rate just being a part of the process.

The most important metric is different for each business and talking about a “conversion rate” implies that it’s a simple, single metric. That’s not true. For e-commerce, revenue and profit are much more important than simple purchase conversion rate. For some businesses, revenue per visitor is most important. For others, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) may be, or Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).

So, the most important metric is unique to the business. But, if you’re looking for an overrated metric, it’s bounce rate. Your bounce rate doesn’t matter.

GetElastic: What elements of a mobile website or app are most important to test?

Chris: Optimization is even more important for mobile than for full-size sites. A mobile browser’s frustration threshold is much lower and they’ll exit even faster than they would on a desktop.

Think about their experience: they’re out on the road with many distractions, noises, people talking and obstacles to avoid. They may even be driving! (Not recommended.)

They also don’t have the problem solving options as easily available. For example, I tried to buy an iPad mini yesterday on Apple’s Store app on my iPhone. I got all the way to the end of the process and hit an error message with the credit card number. There was no reason given that I could see and I tried it three times before giving up. Now, on a desktop, I would have tried other options and had a chat window to open to figure out the problem, but that’s not available on mobile.

So, error message has to be thought through more carefully, all user interface elements must be obvious and easy, messaging must minimize any distraction and maximize clarity. And, of course, load times must be minimized.

We’ve found that the LIFT Model works just as well for improving mobile sites and apps as for desktop experiences that we developed it for. At a recent conference, I presented a session on mobile optimization and showed how to evaluate a mobile landing page for “iphone cases” as an example. Here are a couple slides from that mobile conversion optimization presentation.

And more… (!)

GetElastic: What is the biggest mistake a marketer could make in an A/B or MVT test for an ecommerce site?

There are many mistakes I see commonly. Here are a few of the biggest:

• Starting without a proper process and losing organizational support
• Optimizing for the wrong goals, like add to cart or reducing bounce rate
• Not tracking average revenue per variation
• Focusing only on landing pages and checkout and ignoring all the gold in the middle informational area of the funnel (More about prioritizing testing here.)
• Using before & after (or pre & post) testing instead of controlled, scientific testing

GetElastic: What is your favorite non-testing tool for improving CRO?

Chris: Eye tracking sucks. I agree with Jared Spool, when he said:

Turns out that eye trackers are the most expensive Ouija Boards available to science.

— Jared M. Spool (@jmspool) April 6, 2013

We look for tools that help our Conversion Strategists generate better hypotheses.

• Eye trackers don’t.
• Click heatmap trackers like CrazyEgg sometimes do, in certain situations.
• User testing often does and we use that regularly as part of our conversion rate optimization system.
• Website popup surveys sometimes do, when they reveal UX problems.
• Post-purchase surveys often do.

We’re constantly evaluating new tools that come out and are optimistic about some of the interesting new ones we’re seeing today. I think we’ll see some really interesting CRO support tools in the next couple years.

GetElastic: Beyond conversion optimization testing, what do you think is or could be the next big trend for improving online sales?

Chris:The best thing about scientific marketing (or conversion optimization) as a framework for decision-making is that it can hold all future innovations. Every decision can be approached as a hypothesis to test, whether it’s a website UX challenge or a business model concept.

More and more people from all business areas are talking about the scientific approach to business. For example, Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup is an awesome book about testing business ideas. He’s essentially promoting conversion rate optimization, although he doesn’t use that term.

So, whether the next big thing is HTML5 mobile sites, Responsive Web Design, Big Data, Same-day Delivery, or Google Glass browsing, the ideas can be tested.

GetElastic: Where can our readers find you speaking on conversion optimization this year?

So far, here’s where I know I’ll be speaking:

• Mn Search in Minneapolis, May 29
• Conversion Conference Chicago, June 12 and Boston, Oct 1
• SES Toronto, June 14
• Shop.org Huntington Beach, July 17 (where I know you will be presenting a great session too, Linda!)
• Content Marketing World Cleveland, Sept 11
• eMetrics Boston, Oct 1

Get Elastic readers, if you want to boost your conversion improvement skills, check out You Should Test That and the fine conferences above (and please subscribe to Get Elastic if this is your first time here).

Today’s post highlights tips from the research findings of recently published m-Commerce Usability: Exploring the Mobile Shopping Experience by Baymard Institute.

Based on usability studies, Baymard Institute identifies 5 guidelines for touch keyboards (the report includes tutorials on how to code each tip properly):

1. Disable auto-correct where dictionary is weak

Auto-correct is helpful on mobile devices, but can also make it easy for customers to submit incorrect information when incorrect auto-correct is applied without customers taking notice. Auto-correct is particularly troublesome for abbreviations, street names, email addresses and similar words not in the dictionary.

In the study, even common address abbreviations like Rd were auto-corrected (for example, to “Ed”).

Auto-correct needs only to be disabled on fields where improper autocorrection is a problem, such as Name, Street, City, User ID and email address, and may be left in tact on fields where it may be helpful.

2. Show appropriate keyboard layouts

Best practice is to show the most appropriate keyboard layout for a given field. For example, pull the numeric keyboard for credit card and phone number fields, and email keyboard for email addresses. This spares the user from toggling between keyboards themselves and reduces the potential for errors.

Many of Baymard’s test users took notice of these optimized keyboards, providing positive comments. And typos were significantly reduced, leading to fewer validation errors (especially for long numbers like credit card input).

Be aware that numeric keyboard layouts don’t always allow for alphabetic characters and may only support select special characters. Ensure that neither the field nor keyboard you select prevents proper entry (for example, a telephone number format that requires dashes combined with a keyboard without the dash character). Also ensure that international form fields do not prevent alphabetical inputs for postal code.

3. Honor ‘Next’ and ‘Previous’ button behavior

Users expect Next and Previous buttons to do what they say. Naturally, test subjects had problems with sites that failed to move the user to the next or previous logical field in the form without requiring other changes or form submissions. Surprisingly, this bug occurred on more than one site in the test group.

Not all users will rely on these buttons (rather, use the tab method), but those that do will experience friction if they do not behave as expected.

4. Disable auto-capitalization where appropriate

This is a problem I’ve encountered many times with CAPTCHAs on mobile forms. Smartphones tend to auto-capitalize the first letter in standard text fields, which is helpful for fields like Name, but not for email addresses and case sensitive password selection. Used with CAPTCHAS, failure is inevitable, and the user may not understand why input is failing each time.

5. Consistently invoke keyboard layouts

When optimizing keyboard layouts, be consistent. FTD, for example, applies the numeric keyboard to the credit card field, but not to the security code field that follows.

“What is even more surprising is just how confused some of the test subjects were by this. They began questioning their initial interpretation of the field, thinking that maybe something else was required. For example, when seeing the standard keyboard layout for the “Card Security Code”, the subjects began wondering if this was the 3-digit code on the back of their VISA card or if perhaps it was one of the many other numbers printed on the card.”

It’s a good idea to test your form fields on a variety of popular devices, as not all touch screens behave alike.

Get Elastic was provided with a review copy of this report, you can get your own copy of m-Commerce Usability: Exploring the Mobile Shopping Experience, which includes 147 actionable guidelines specific to mobile commerce optimization.

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But what about the unconventional things that you can experiment with in checkout? Today we’ll “check out” 3:

Facebook authentication

Social sign on through Facebook, Twitter and now Google+ is common for media sites like Rdio, Spotify and Huffington Post, as it simplifies site registration down to just a few button clicks. But it’s less commonly found on ecommerce sites.

An alternative to registering through a long form, Wine.com offers the option to register and subsequently sign in with Facebook. Not all customers will want to register this way, but it could reduce abandonment amongst those who see the value in simple registration. It also spares customers from creating and remembering another password, or which email address was used for account creation.

An ecommerce site that uses social sign on should consider FUD – the fears, uncertainties and doubts customers may experience. Wine.com provides a detailed explanation of why one would benefit from Facebook Connect, how data is shared and how privacy concerns are handled.

Social login is tricky to test, it’s better to make the strategic decision and stick with it. If you decide to drop it down the road, you can migrate Facebookers to your regular account system, but not without notifying customers and creating/issuing a password for them, which may cause more customer confusion and frustration than the tactic was intended to avoid.

Chat button

Apple inserts a secondary call-to-action to remind customers they can launch a chat window at any point of the one-page checkout that help is required. The subtle button appears at each step opposite the Continue button. It’s a user-friendly tactic, the customer doesn’t need to scroll up or down to look for the chat feature, and doesn’t have to lose her place in the form.

Inject some personality

I’ve recommended the Amazon-style ask-for-email-as-first-step approach several times on Get Elastic, so it’s not such an unconventional thing to test. But Bonobos really takes it to another level, almost entertaining the customer with creative copy that handles FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) around privacy and security, and makes the first step look very quick and easy to complete.

The password entry step is equally as simple and whimsical.

Bonobos’ payment entry step is also creative and fun. What if this approach outperformed the traditional, stale web form?

Before looking at the unusual, make sure you’ve covered the basics first. We have a number of checkout optimization articles to check out.

Create an account

Offering guest checkout with option to create an account after successful conversion is a win-win, but don’t forget to romance why the customer should bother creating one. Action Envelope makes this a simple 3-field process, but the call-to-action does compete with several other page elements.

Image credit: PitStop Media

Keep shopping

Are you thinking “why would someone who just finished shopping want to start again?”

Sometimes cross-selling and upselling is ignored or worse — causes abandonment — during the buying process, so post-purchase merchandising gives you a second chance to get the buyer’s attention. And, you now have concrete evidence of purchase intent (and ownership). Product recommendations may be even more relevant to this type of visitor.

Suggest, suggest, suggest

This Amazon example is overwhelming, and I don’t necessarily recommend the “shotgun” approach, but it gives you a good cross-section of the ways you can merchandize (recommended based on browse history, new items, etc). Though I’m surprised this example doesn’t include social proof “customers who bought X also bought YZA,” though it may be that there were multiple items in the order.

Image credit: SearchEngineLand via @SandraNiehaus <-- follow her!

Let’s make a deal

NFL Shop incentivizes re-purchase with a coupon code (via email).

Image credit: Listrak

Smart cross-sell

This confirmation email from Shutterfly is smart on several levels. It’s persuasive, using “gift to say thank you” rather than a simple coupon code. “We’d like to treat you” makes the buyer feel special. It’s time-limited to create urgency, and suggests taking up the offer will enhance the use of the purchased product (photos), to take the next step and create a photo book.

Image credit: PracticalEcommerce

Get ‘em curious

Bliss features products — not with thumbnails — but with creative that really pre-sells the product and generates interest. “Winner after 40,000 votes” and “20-in-1 wonder balm” play on the converted buyer’s curiosity.

Image credit: SearchEngineLand

Email opt-in

The above Bliss example also includes a subtle email opt-in. Don’t be afraid to combine calls-to-action, just make sure they’re priority weighted in your design.

Content, tools and apps

NFL Shop highlights its gift finder tool, but you could certainly link to native apps (including app-catalogs), blogs, content features, event calendars, and the like.

Image credit: Listrak

Survey

Survey requests can be incentived or unincentivized.

Image credit: SearchEngineLand

Notice the email opt-in above?

Image credit: Econsultancy via @gcharlton <-- follow him!

Gettin’ social

Share purchase

Though I doubt this is a highly-used feature, be my guest to use it.

Image credit: South Florida Web Marketing Blog

This will be more successful for certain industries than others (books, music, some apparel, etc)

Pin it!

Customers may be shy to share purchases on Facebook, but may be more likely to Pin them to Pinterest. Sephora enables individual items to be shared.

Aliexpress marketplace offers multiple sharing buttons after a buyer has left seller feedback.

Image credits: GetElastic

Recruit

Rather than socially share individual purchases, why not ask your customer to recruit for you? This makes sense for membership sites (like socially-conscious Kiva) and vente-privee like HauteLook or Gilt.

Image credit: SearchEngineLand

Sharing can be incentivized with referral points.

Image credit: AllThingsD

At the very least, re-stating your business’ value proposition on Thank You pages and in confirmation emails can take the edge of any buyer’s remorse and encourage the customer to buy with you again next time.

Bottom line: do something. A generic Thank You page is a wasted opportunity.

Rishi Rawat points out a great way to motivate customers to leave that first review — offer an incentive, like loyalty points:

But there’s also another way — recruit staff reviewers.

Tips for staff reviews:

1. Make sure the reviewer truly has tried or owns the product.

Integrity!

2. Don’t make it a sales pitch

An authentic review doesn’t read like product knowledge. For example, instead of:

“This camcorder features a built-in Wi-Fi for wireless video transfer to a PC or online sharing sites likes YouTube and Facebook. It uses AVCHD recording for the highest quality viewing on an HDTV or archiving, or in MP4 format for easy sharing with mobile devices or cloud applications. The 32x optical zoom allows you to take close-ups while you record in seamless HD.”

Describe the experience of really using the item and how it compares to alternatives of the same category. A more constructive review would read something like:

“The video quality on this model is excellent, it’s fairly easy to set up and works on both Windows and MacBook Pro. Another big plus is it downloads directly to an external hard drive, bypassing the computer. Keep in mind it lacks dual card slots and has a relatively short battery life. If you’re a power-filmer you may want to consider grabbing an extended life battery. For the price, it’s still a good deal for casual use.”

3. Don’t be afraid to mention negatives

Your staff are more trustworthy when they describe the pros and cons. A good staff review should describe the pros, cons and alternatives (including product names) that may serve the customer well if the cons are a dealbreaker.

4. Sneak in product knowledge

The screenshot example from Sephora highlights a value prop – camelina oil is “super moisturizing.” Try to tie features to benefits in the review, if possible.

5. Disclose it’s a staff review

The major product review vendors provide staff reviewer badges. Use ‘em. If your solution doesn’t, ensure a signature or disclosure is included somewhere in the text.

6. Stick to one staff review

The purpose of the first review is to give the customer at least one non-marketer opinion of the product, and to provide the visual star review on category, search and product pages. Once you break the ice, let customers pick up the slack. You certainly can add more staff reviews down the road, but the biggest impact comes from the first. Use staff time to write for products that still need that first review.

Additional tips

With reviews, the more the better. According to PowerReviews, you need 7 to 10 reviews to get a stable star rating, and generating “fresh” reviews can help SEO. We’ve got 5 more ideas for getting more customer reviews.

Tweetables

• The average American consumes 19 hours of online video per month Tweet this

• Consumers watch product video 60% of the time Tweet this

• 52% of consumers say watching product videos make them more confident in purchase decisions Tweet this

• 3/5 consumers will spend at least 2 minutes watching product video Tweet this

• 1/2 consumers are less likely to return a product after viewing a video Tweet this

• Mobile shoppers are 3x as likely to view video as desktop or laptop users Tweet this

• 1/2 of smartphone owners watched product video on their device in a 3mo period Tweet this

• Shoppers who view product video are 174% more likely to purchase Tweet this

• Nearly 40% of consumers report videos increase their likelihood to purchase via mobile Tweet this

• 25% of mobile Internet users made a mobile purchase in 2012 Tweet this

• 62% of iPad shoppers spent more than $250 on consumer products last year Tweet this

• 76% of marketers plan to add video to their sites Tweet this

How long is long?

Web usability guidelines suggest dropdown menus with more than 15 items should be avoided. This guideline is also recommended for mobile.

On iPhone, for example, only 5 selections are visible at a time while scrolling through a long menu. Even when menu options are alphabetized, an aggressive swipe can send the menu spinning like the Price is Right’s Showcase Showdown wheel.

According to Nielsen Norman research, menus of state abbreviations are much faster to type than to select from a drop-down. “Free-form input into fields with restricted options does require data validation on the backend, but from a usability perspective it’s often the best way to go.”

This is, however, much easier on keyboards than touch screens, but is still an option for mobile forms. Input errors are more common on touchscreens as qwerty letters are tiny tap targets. Switching to this form of input is not the perfect solution for mobile. So how can you preserve long drop-downs whilst making them easier to use?

1. Open field autocompletion vs. fixed drop-down menus

Open field autocompletion is just like a search box autocompletion – suggestions appear (in drop-down format) as the user types, and the menu shrinks as letters filter menu options. A user may ignore the drop-down and keep typing, but it serves to speed the process and reduce errors for those that take advantage of it.

One example of this in action is Brooks Brothers:

It’s important to test, not just multiple mobile browsers, but also orientations. In landscape mode, the overlay covers up the touchable selection area of the dropdown.

2. Present most common countries first

If the majority of your customers order from a handful of countries, presenting them at the top of them menu eliminates the need to scroll — especially for United States and United Kingdom customers.

3. Narrow to most common countries

Eurocar narrows its menu to its top 40 countries (for its mobile site, only). This is still beyond 15 menu item guideline, and risks making life much more difficult for customers outside of the 40. Use this option cautiously.

Image source: UX Booth

4. Use GPS detection to suggest country

Redeeming itself, Eurocar taps into the GPS capabilities of mobile devices, requesting geolocation permission from mobile users.

An alternative to client-side permission is server-side paid geolocation tools like Akamai and Maxmind, which removes a layer of friction — user permission is not required (asking for geolocation may provoke FUD anxiety). There’s a slight trade-off on accuracy vs. GPS location, but for country selection, pin-point accuracy is not as important as city or exact location.

5. Ask for ZIP code first

While this won’t solve international selection issues, asking for ZIP or postal code before city / state allows you to prefill or narrow down the selection options for these fields.

Bonus: Other Mobile Drop-down Issues

If you don’t absolutely need to ask for information in any form, don’t — especially on mobile. Financial Times may have its reasons for asking profession, role and industry, but it’s safer to make these optional, post-conversion requests.

Menus like the above also pose a problem that they are not as straightforward as Country or State. The user really has to read each option and mentally process what is the correct option (unless they cheat and select one at random).

Another problem is when menu options don’t fully display on mobile devices. In the case of delivery date selection below, this input is better served by a calendar or abbreviated text (Fri 5/24 – $9.99, for example).

Take a moment today to test your site’s conversion funnel forms on at least one mobile device (multiple devices and multiple mobile browsers, if possible) in portrait and landscape mode. Do you encounter any problems?

(Email subscribers, can’t see video? View this post on the Web)

How it works is simple. Amex holders sync their card and Twitter accounts, and follow @AmexSync to watch for deals of the day and corresponding hashtags. @AmexSync will respond with a confirmation hashtag, which the user must retweet within 15 minutes. Product is delivered to the billing address connected to the Amex card.

Amex also has a (previously launched) Offers program, where discounts can be claimed through the same process, and savings can be to purchase at the Offer retailer’s website (so long as the synced Amex is used for payment).

Aside from making impulse buying frictionless, the brilliance is the baked-in social component — all sales through the channel are broadcast through the cardholder’s network. Twitter accounts must be public in order for @AmexSync to read and respond, so every offer claimed and purchase made is a public affair.

Participating brands benefit from the social boost. Upcoming products include Kindle Fire, Donna Karan jewelry, Sony Action Cam and Xbox 360.

What’s most intriguing is it’s not an online retailer that pioneered the convert-by-hashtag. Amazon and eBay could easily have done this syncing saved billing information, perhaps they will “follow.” Any telecom could leverage carrier billing, or any loyalty program to generate excitement and bump up point-churn.

Of course, with all shiny objects, only time will tell if customers care about buying with hashtags. The more exciting aspect is the ability to buy through an independent channel without enduring the traditional checkout process, or even visiting a website.

Click to enlarge

The creative folks at Cue Blocks came up with this crazy snakes-and-ladders-esque Infographic along with a 91-point checklist Holy Grail of Ecommerce Optimization which is worth giving a look as well.

I’m not even gonna attempt at pulling out Tweetables for you this week. Grab a cup of Joe (or 2), the infographic and checklist may keep you busy all weekend…