The National Geographic Society has been inspiring people to care about the planet since 1888. It is one of the largest nonprofit scientific and educational institutions in the world. The National Geographic team wanted to improve the conversion of their webshop and started by testing a simple free shipping offer.
Hypothesis
Adding a free shipping offer will increase revenue.
Results
|
Improvement wk1 |
Improvement wk2 |
| Free shipping (no threshold) |
+18,9% |
+2,2% |
| Free shipping over $50 |
+33,8% |
-11,4% |
| Free shipping over $75 |
-98,9% |
-25,8% |
| Free shipping over $100 |
+14,6% |
+4,8% |
Learnings
Offering free shipping indeed increases revenue. But the team was surprised about the results:
The original expectation was that free shipping for all purchases would produce the highest revenue lift, and that as minimum purchase thresholds rose, revenue would decline. However in week 1 the threshold of $50 and in wk 2 the threshold of $100 outperformed the ‘no threshold’ offer. A possible explanation could be that the average order size increases as people buy more or more expensive items to qualify for free shipping.
The second surprise concerns the big difference in results between week 1 and week 2. This shows that results can dramatically shift in time. It would be interesting to see the results over longer periods of time.
Test details
| Test element |
Banner
|
| Page type |
All |
| Test date |
August 2014 |
Website information
