A/B Split Test: How custom clothing company increased purchases 20% with small website tweak that reduced anxiety

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Coastal Reign is a custom clothing printing company that has been around for 10 years and has CAD 7.5 million in annual sales. The Canadian ecommerce brand has facilities in Vancouver and Toronto.

Don’t think that location is just some filler I added into the article. It’s Chekhov’s gun. As playwright Anton Chekhov explained, "Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first act that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third act it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

You may assume your location has little relevance for your potential customers. Everything is digital and shipping is global so why should they care where you’re located? For this reason, maybe location is not displayed prominently on your website.

BEFORE: Overlooked positioning

And that is the setup Coastal Reign had. No prominent display of location.

Creative Sample #1: Custom clothing website control

AFTER: Canadian visuals to help assure customer

Managers at the clothing company have weekly meetings with the customer service team, and they report to the founder about what they learn in those meetings from the front-line staff.

A lot of customers call in asking if the company is Canadian and are thrilled when they find out it is. This really surprised the leadership team – there are plenty of Canadian suppliers out there, especially online.

They used this feedback to inform a testing hypothesis. “Because of that [customer service discovery], we decided to run a split test on Google Optimize,” said Eddison Ng, Founder, Coastal Reign.

Creative Sample #2: Custom clothing website treatment

The team ran this split test in the beginning of 2023 on the header of every page of the website, specifically targeted at new Canadian visitors. Half saw the logo with a Canadian maple leaf in the upper left of the site and the Canadian flag in the upper right, and the other half so the control with no Canadian signifiers in the nav.

RESULTS: Anxiety reduction boosts purchases by 20.23%

Now it’s time for Act Three of our story, for the proverbial gun we introduced in Act One to go off.

This small change produced a 20.23% increase in purchases at a 99% level of confidence according to Google Optimize. The test showed that location was not a small detail with little relevance, something Chekhov would encourage us to remove. Rather, it was key to the story potential customers think about when considering a purchase.

“It reduces their anxiety. Mainly because with our industry mistakes can happen because each order is a new project. Our average order size is above $1,000 so it’s almost considered a ‘luxury’ purchase,” he said. “They will also know for a fact that there are no duty charges or potential delays in shipping.”

Related resources

Marketing 101: What is an A/B split test?

B2B Lead Gen: A/B split test helps increase quote requests 262%

A/B Testing: Why do different sample size calculators and testing platforms produce different estimates of statistical significance?