Is there a way to do A/B testing in CS-Cart?
You can use some google tools, but they are geared to the page level. I.e. show home page 1 or home page 2 and see the stats. But cs-cart (being dynamic and all) is not very well prepared for that.
What I do on client sites that want to measure whether a new change drives more sales or not is:[list]
[]Set a value in a user's session (random) for whether they're on the A or B plan (use the fill_auth hook).
[]Set a template variable {$user_test} to be set to A/B respectively based on that user's session.
[]Add conditional code for what you want to test using {if $user_test == 'A'}do the A thing{else}do the B thing{/if}
[]Then (depending on what's important to you) add a pre-process controller for checkout.add or checkout.checkout and update a DB table with data related to the $user_test.
[*]Write a little routine that will gather the data from the DB table and provide you stats on whether A or B gets the user to add to their cart or go to checkout
[/list]
Unfortunately, this is kind of custom all the way around so I can't offer it as an addon. The data collected is geared toward the site and obviously the actual conditional template code would be custom too.
But that's how I've approached the problem in cs-cart. We were trying to improve the number of abandoned carts by various changes to the initial checkout steps. We learned that in this customer's case, there was very little change no matter what we did. However, adding a short paragraph to the top about why we require users to register did the most. I.e. “We require registration to reduce fraud and thereby keep our prices low…”
Once I get deeper into V3, it might be possible using the new block manager import/export to make the A/B testing on various pages (including the home page) more reasonable.
gatorguy we actually wanted to make a plugin so Convert.com's A/B testing software for ecommerce can be integrated. If you have recommendations on good developers we are looking for one so we can integrate with CS-cart !
Dennis
dennis@convert.com
That looks great. Hope any developer wants to collaborate to the cs cart integration.
[quote]
gatorguy we actually wanted to make a plugin so Convert.com's A/B testing software for ecommerce can be integrated. If you have recommendations on good developers we are looking for one so we can integrate with CS-cart !
[/quote]
If it's a PHP integration, you can send a spec to supportXX@ez-msXX.com (remove X's) and I'll take a look and give you a quote. If it's JS, it's probably not going to work effeciently in cs-cart.
Anything new on this topic?