Matt Ezyk is a digital commerce and technology leader focused on where technology, marketing, and customer experience meet. He writes about strategy, technology, UX, performance, team dynamics, and what it really takes to scale eCommerce. These are lessons from the trenches shared to spark ideas and collaborate.
There’s a common trap in eCommerce …and far too many retail executives fall into it. It starts with a revenue plateau and ends with a massive investment in expensive A/B testing tools. But nothing moves because the UX foundation is broken.
You can’t experiment your way out of bad UX. (And trust me, plenty have tried). You need to start from a place of certainty and stability.
Which is why, when I lead digital commerce turnarounds, I focus on the fundamentals first.
If your site performance is sluggish, your product discovery is clunky, or your checkout experience is full of friction, an A/B test on the color of your Buy Now button is a waste of time and resources.
Stop Testing, Start Fixing
There’s a distinct difference between ‘optimization’ and ‘repair’. That being that optimization is about refinement, whereas repair is a question of making the product functional for the user.
In practical terms, if 25 percent of your customers are struggling to navigate your category pages, you don’t need a test to tell you the navigation‘s broken, you just need to fix it. I often see brands get paralyzed by the need for ‘statistical significance’ and the like, before making common-sense improvements. But this only hinders progress.
In my experience leading cross-functional organizations of 50+ across engineering and product, the biggest gains almost always come from site performance and fundamental usability.
So, before you launch your next experiment, ask yourself if you’ve hit these benchmarks:
- The page loads in under two seconds
- A customer can check out in three clicks or less
- The mobile experience is as seamless as the desktop version
- The search functionality returns relevant results
If the answer to any of these is no, put the testing software away: you’re not ready for CRO.
The Complexity Trap
I’m a huge advocate for automation and its ability to create the next generation of retail experiences, but it’s important to remember that AI is an amplifier — it becomes powerful when it can amplify what’s already working.
When you have issues with your fundamentals, adding AI or complex multivariate testing just adds unnecessary (and sometimes harmful) complexity. The strongest results come from brands that have their house in order first.
Clarity Comes from the Customer
It took me a long time to learn that real clarity often shows up when you step away from the data dashboards and look at the actual customer journey. Sometimes the best thing you can do for your work is disconnect from the metrics and walk through your site, just as a first-time user would.
If you find yourself frustrated by your own interface, your customers are already long gone. To be blunt, they don’t care about your testing roadmap… they care about whether or not they can buy what they want without getting a headache.
Fix the UX. Stabilize the foundation. Only then should you start running experiments. The revenue growth you’re looking for is usually hidden in the basics you’re currently overlooking.
Ready to establish and build on solid foundations? Book a Free Demo today.
