Just wrapped up a simple A/B test of the purchase form on Bvckup 2 website and the results are definitely worth sharing.
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The test was to measure if making PayPal a more prominent payment option would have any effect on the sales. Going from a version that used PayPal as a fallback option, tucked away in the fine print -
to a version that placed PayPal link into the form itself -
Clearly, there was going to be a change, but what actually happened was a bit unexpected.
Drum roll…
This change increased PayPal sales by 108%, in $ volume.
That is, they doubled.
Obviously the question is if this happened at the expense of credit card sales, i.e. if people just started opting for PayPal instead of Stripe.
Drum roll #2
Stripe sales also increased, by 7.2%.
Yielding the overall increase in $ volume of 23.8%.
And that’s pretty incredible if you ask me.
But why?
First of all, here’s the raw data, so that inquisitive minds could check the math and run their own checks for statistical significance:
Going into this test, my assumption was that PayPal is more of a fallback option for the majority of people, so making it more visible would just shift some volume from Stripe to PayPal and, perhaps, cause a small bump in volume.
However that assumption was obviously wrong. The effect of having PP on the payment form appears to be far more reaching and I can think of several things that might explain the actual numbers:
- The number of people who use PayPal exclusive (religiously?) is unexpectedly large.
- The number of people who mistrust hosted credit card forms is large as well. They neither know or care that in modern CC processing their card information doesn’t touch vendor’s servers.
- Having a PayPal option implies better accountability on vendor’s part, making people more comfortable with purchasing process in general, and paying with a credit card in particular.
So there you have it.
One last thing is that we have an even mix of technical home users and professional IT crowd — that’s our context. Obviously, YMMV if you are selling just to the enterprise or in a different domain altogether.
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Like what you read? Check out our development diary for one of a kind peek into the process of a modern Windows app development — https://bvckup2.com/wip