Hi all! There have been many changes to the Envato Market sites over the last year, and I thought it would be helpful to give some context about the way our teams are delivering these.
What is it?
Our current method of delivering improvements on Envato Market uses a “hypothesis-driven testing” approach. This allows us to rapidly test several different characteristics, gathering data about the relative importance of these. That data allows us to iterate on the design of our Market pages, ensuring that every new version results in measurable improvements.
Why are you doing it?
The goals for this series of tests are to improve conversion rates (the % of customers making a purchase) on Envato Market, and to reduce the exit rate of customers from item pages.
What process are you using?
We are using hypothesis-driven testing for this work. Our marketplaces are very large sites, with many different components, and these combine in different ways to influence the customer experience on site.
Running tests with multiple variants allows us to get more information faster, and gives us the opportunity to measure how customers react to different combinations of changes. Each test includes a control variant, which is the page as it displays today, to allow us to accurately track any changes in customer behaviour.
It also gives us the chance to iterate with new information: we run a test, analyse the results and then incorporate what we have learned into the next test.
What is the scope of these tests?
We’re really excited to be focussing on the Item Pages. As you probably know, we have previously focused on the Envato Market home pages, category pages, and search results. Item listings are a large part of the Marketplace, and we’re confident there are opportunities to improve the customer experience and increase conversion by changing this page.
At this time, we won’t be making changes to how item ratings are calculated, or to the process for leaving comments on item pages. Our tests will focus on finding the most beneficial way to display existing information to customers at the right time in their journey.
What do I need to do?
No action is needed during the tests.
As we learn more about what makes a more successful item page, we will begin making changes to the design of our item pages. We’ll also be publishing information for authors, sharing tips and advice that you can use to improve your item listings.
The first experiment we ran focussed on the Call To Action in live previews for ThemeForest and CodeCanyon items. We found that having the iFrame and a consistent display of the ‘Buy now’ button resulted in a significant increase to conversion. The best performing variant not only increased conversion, it also resulted in sales for the largest number of authors, and the largest variety of individual items sold.
Our next few tests are on the item page itself - you’ll probably notice some of the changes, so remember you may be seeing something a little different from other people, and these changes will be iterated on.
If you have any questions about our testing approach for Envato Market, please let us know - @sunnicee and the Market Product team can help clarify in this forum thread.
