E-commerce: Spruce Up Your Web Site with Improved Web Selling Techniques

He cited the example of women’s plus-size apparel catalog Ulla Popken. Before launching a brand new Web site in 2003, featuring a revamped shopping cart and checkout process, an advanced site search, and an advanced results sorting page, Ulla Popken set up an A/B split test to measure if there was any effect on sales. For seven days, 50 percent of the traffic to the main URL was sent to the old Web site, and 50 percent was sent to the new site. Only after noting that the new site generated 32 percent more sales than the old site did executives at the company order the full launch of the new site.