Talk about over-generalizing???

1) if you Google “Don’t Waste Time and Lost Sales On Split Testing” you find only links to THIS blog – not the original source material.

2) the original source suggests one of those 5 background colors at the top of the page is a secret weapon for converting sales… but then it uses a different color for its own sales panel.

Thanks for stopping by the blog. I may have come across as snarky, but actually this product being sold does not imply that your results may vary. It’s not promoting testing, it’s selling test results.

I can’t read “Don’t Waste Time and Lost Sales On Split Testing – Simply Borrow My Results

Here’s the big idea. You don’t have to waste your time or money split testing. You don’t have to spend months and months before you go to market, or thousands of dollars in PPC advertising like we did to learn what really works. You can simply borrow my results.

I can almost guarantee you simply based on the large scientific numbers that we use to gather the results of these tests you could never gather this information even if you had 8 years and a million dollars to waste trying…”

…without getting a little pissed. Why? Because this is misleading.

Actually no, he is selling his results and claiming this will save you time and money on testing.

Didn’t one of your interviewees talk about how Amazon tweaked their buy button and all his clients immediately phoned up frothing at the mouth and wanting the same new super button that Amazon had? …when it turned out Amazon had only tweaked it to allow them an extra line of text somewhere else on the page.

We have recently tested a website that actually uses red buying buttons – conform the styleguide. The test persons did not have any problem with (or remark on) the red buttons. Of course, a usability test is different from quantitative testing, but the test did confirm the article’s conclusion that it all depends on context.

True enough, he does advocate testing. But he also does present this particular button as some kind of holy grail. I don’t believe there is one perfect button, suitable for ANY website.

Tim,

Yes, I’d like to see such a test too. I have observed, in user tests, confusion when anything OTHER than “cart” or “basket” is used. For example, one site had a shopping “bag”. I observed more than one user searching for a “cart” button when a “bag” was right there!

Or what if you sell in the UK, does “add to cart” outperform “add to basket?”

Caught me eye. I once attended an e-commerce seminar in which we were assured that “cart” beats “basket”, even in the UK from someone who had tested it across various sites. But they did not go into specifics. I would like to have been sure, for example, that it was only the word which changed, and nothing else. It might have been relevant to know the type of market too.

Has anyone from the UK reading this done such a test, I wonder? Would you be able to share?