The CRO landscape is littered with misinformation about what you should split-test to grow your Shopify store. The problem is that there are so few case studies publicly available (for obvious reasons), that the same advice is re-hashed, recycled and repeated across dozens of “expert” blogs.

But here’s some advice that’s tried and true:

CRO Blunder #1 – Not testing at all/properly!

Not running split-tests on your Shopify store is a mortal sin. Your business will stay stuck if you’re not growing it with improvements in your conversion rate.

Worse still is testing using the “before-and-after” method. This crude method doesn’t use split-testing software like Google Optimize. You make a change then watch to see what happens.

This method sucks because, if like most e-commerce stores, your orders fluctuate week-to-week, you may make the wrong decision and keep a losing variation that you thought was a winner. This is bad news for your business!

It’s much better to know to the penny what helps and what hurts your conversions, not guess.

CRO Blunder #2 – Blindly following “best-practice”

The truth is that unless you identify the specific issues YOUR visitors are having with YOUR website, then your split-tests will often yield disappointing results.

But when you uncover your visitor’s sales objections, points of confusion and frustration you tap into a goldmine of information to base your split-tests on. And when you address these issues, that’s when you get off-the-chart results.

Not only that, but discovering what persuaded your customers to buy allows you to emphasize this in your sales copy to tip the balance for visitors that are undecided.

CRO Blunder #3 – Obsessing over what your competitors and the big players are doing

“Don’t focus on the competition, they’ll never give you money.” – Jeff Bezos

Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to keep one eye on what your competitors are up to. It’s also a good idea to look at what key players in other markets are doing. You might be able to get some inspiration for a split-test of your own.

And often, ideas from a completely unrelated industry can translate into big wins for you too.

But where people go wrong is that they assume, just because your evil nemesis competitor has changed their product page layout, that it must be working. The chances are your competitors haven’t got a clue what they’re doing…

On top of that, if you’re convinced everything Amazon does works, you’re in for a fall. The problem is it’s difficult to tell whether you’re seeing a losing test page or not. The answer is to test everything for yourself. Don’t make changes just because you’ve seen Amazon do something.

CRO Blunder #4 – Optimizing the wrong pages