A Comprehensive Review of Visually for Shopify

The most profitable Shopify stores all share one thing in common — they never stay the same for long. By rolling out new campaigns, page designs, and messaging at a steady pace, merchants are able to continuously improve their online businesses and stay one step ahead of the competition.

Of course, you don’t want to make changes just for the sake of making changes. Each edit should bring you closer to your ultimate business goals, such as instilling a strong sense of brand loyalty and convincing as many people as possible to make a purchase. If you’re not careful, you may even end up making changes that have a negative impact and drive people away from your store.

How can you be sure that the changes you make are having their intended effect? The only way to truly find out is through A/B testing. Otherwise, you’re just flying blind.

A/B testing involves sending some visitors to the original version of your store while sending others to a variant with changes over the same period of time. Then, by reviewing how each of these versions performed during your experiment, you’ll have your answer as to whether or not your changes are worth sticking with. 

Ready to start running experiments on your own store? On Shopify, Visually stands out as a popular tool available for this purpose. Below, we’ll review everything you need to know about this app and the use cases that it powers for merchants.

Visually Pricing

Visually offers three plans: Launch, Pro, and Scale.

• Launch: Designed for brands that already have a team or agency dedicated to A/B testing, this plan will give you access to Visually’s A/B testing features but doesn’t offer any additional guidance or support other than a private Slack channel. 
• Pro: To help brands that are new to A/B testing get the most out of Visually’s technical capabilities, this plan includes everything in Launch plus a storefront audit, conversion rate optimization (CRO) consulting, four monthly hours of engineering support, and two monthly executed A/B tests. Also, Shopify Plus brands will be able to use Visually for price and shipping testing if they have signed up for the Pro plan.
• Scale: This plan is best for brands that are highly experienced with A/B testing and want to run advanced experiments. It includes everything in Pro plus competitor analysis, a personalized CRO roadmap, exclusive access to new features, 10 hours of monthly engineering support, and four monthly executed A/B tests.

Your monthly order volume will determine which of these plans are available to you, as well as how much they cost.

You’ll need at least 5,000 monthly orders to access the Launch plan, which starts at $630 per month (5,000 to 7,500 orders) and goes up to $1,800 per month (27,500 to 30,000 orders).

The Pro plan is available for much smaller stores — it will run you anywhere from $15 per month (0 to 100 orders) to $3,600 per month (27,500 to 30,000 orders). And for the Scale plan, you’ll need to pay somewhere between $1,200 per month (600 to 1,500 orders) to $8,280 per month (27,500 to 30,000 orders).

Brands with more than 30,000 monthly orders will need to contact Visually for custom pricing. Also, a 10% discount is available to merchants who pay per year rather than per month. 

Visually Features

From the content and layout of your pages to your pricing and shipping policies, you can use Visually to test out changes to just about any part of your Shopify store. 

To design your experiments and analyze their performance, Visually provides you with the following tools:

• AI-powered visual editor: Once you install Visually, the app will scan your store and analyze how it is built. Then, Visually will be able to load your store onto their editor, allowing you to customize any of the elements on a given page directly through their platform. You can also create new content blocks from scratch or choose to hide whatever elements you want in your variant. 
• Code editor: While the visual editor is convenient, you also have the option to insert your own custom code to change a variant’s appearance or functionality whenever you may find it necessary.
• Personalization: By default, the experiments you publish with Visually will use everyone who visits your store as the test audience. But if you’d prefer, you could target your test to a particular group of visitors instead. There are a few pre-built options for setting this up (new visitors, returning visitors, visitors who have viewed a certain product, visitors who were directed to your store through a specific marketing campaign, etc.), and you can create your own custom audiences as well. 
• Upselling: Visually also allows you to add and customize a recommended products section on your shopping cart page. You have 12 options to choose from for which products will be included in this section (you can pick the products manually, base it on the customer’s behavior, feature your newest or most popular products, etc.), and you’ll be able to A/B test these different options to see which one works best for your store.
• Bayesian statistical engine: After you launch a test, Visually will let you know when you reach statistical significance (and if you haven’t reached it yet, Visually will let you know how long it should take to get there). This is quite helpful information for A/B tests — if the results of your experiment aren’t yet statistically significant, then any difference in performance between the original and the variant might be due to random change rather than whatever it is you are actually trying to test.
• In-depth analytics: Visually can keep track of many different metrics for both the original and the variant that you’re testing, including number of sessions, number of transactions, conversion rate, average order value, total revenue, per session value, and more. You can also filter your results for certain kinds of users, such as new visitors, returning visitors, desktop visitors, or mobile visitors.

Overall, Visually will help you discover exactly what you must do in order to make more sales on your Shopify store.

Visually Use Cases

There are myriad reasons why a merchant might want to consider using a tool like Visually, including:

• Make redesigns less risky: Maybe it’s time to refresh the look of your site — an outdated design may give the impression that your products are outdated as well, causing some visitors to consider competitors that seem more cutting edge instead. But any time you make a change to your site’s design, there’s a chance that customers will like it less than what you had before. With Visually, you can put new design elements to the test and confirm that they don’t have a negative impact on user experience before you fully commit to them. 
• Fine-tune your content strategy: Just like the design of your site, written content such as your homepage copy should also be spruced up from time to time. And some pieces of content that you may think of as static, such as product descriptions, could also possibly be improved upon. Indeed, by including more compelling arguments or reprioritizing which features you’re highlighting, you very well may be able to convert more visitors into customers. Visually will show you whether any of the changes you make to this language are actually helping.
• Determine whether new features are worth keeping: From countdown clocks encouraging customers to act urgently on limited-time sales to personalized banner ads promoting products based on the visitor’s shopping history, there’s no limit to the number of new features that you could try out for your store. Visually’s analytics will allow you to make an informed decision about whether such new features should be implemented long-term. 
• Diagnose potential issues affecting your store’s overall performance: If your sales figures are struggling, is that something you can fix, or is the issue due to a slowdown in your industry or the economy as a whole? It can be tricky to figure this out — for example, if you make some changes and then sales tick back up, this might be due to the changes you made, or your performance might have recovered anyway due to broader trends (and in that case, maybe your sales would have been even better without the changes). By comparing performance over the same period of time, A/B testing makes it possible to identify what’s really going on with your store.

Shogun A/B Testing Alternative

Nearly all of the features offered by Visually can also be found in Shogun A/B Testing. This includes the  ability to create fully customized variants for your experiments, target your tests to custom audiences, and review the performance of your tests according to a variety of different metrics.

And compared to Visually, Shogun A/B Testing offers a couple significant advantages:

• Low cost: The pricing for Shogun A/B Testing, which you can download directly from the Shopify App Store, ranges from $9 per month to $299 per month. As mentioned above, there are many circumstances where Visually would cost you thousands of dollars per month — even Shogun A/B Testing’s top-tier plan, which includes all features and unlimited ongoing tests, will only cost you a fraction of that. 
• No learning curve: With Shogun A/B Testing, you can use Shopify’s built-in theme editor to design the variants for your tests. That means you won’t need to get familiar with any new tools for this part of the process, making it easier to set up your experiments and allowing you to get started much faster.

Shogun A/B Testing also enables you to create several different kinds of experiments:

• Page tests: Try out changes to an individual page.
• Split URL tests: Redirect some of the traffic that’s currently going to one page to an entirely different page, then compare the results. 
• Template tests: Try out changes to a template that’s been applied to multiple pages (this could be a product page template, collection page template, etc.).
• Theme tests: Redirect some traffic to a version of your store that has a different Shopify theme applied. 

So, if you’re searching for an A/B testing tool that’s affordable, flexible, and easy to use, you might want to explore what Shogun A/B Testing can do.