Implementing A/B testing is a powerful strategy to fine-tune your business operations and increase revenue. By comparing two alternatives at a specific point of customer interaction—whether it’s on your website, checkout page, or email campaigns—you eliminate personal bias and make data-driven decisions that can directly impact conversion rates.
While the concept of A/B testing has been around since the 19th century, the digital revolution of the past few decades has made it an essential practice for online businesses worldwide. In fact, many of today’s most successful global companies thrive because of a culture of constant experimentation. Netflix is a well-known example: As the company itself notes, “we use controlled A/B experiments to test nearly all proposed changes to our product.”
For cross-border merchants selling to Brazil, A/B testing takes on even greater importance. Brazilian shoppers have unique expectations around payments, promotions, and checkout flows. Testing different approaches with your local audience not only helps you optimize conversion, but also ensures your international business adapts smoothly to the realities of this fast-growing e-commerce market.
That’s exactly what we’ll cover in this article. We’ll explore practical examples of A/B tests you can run—including experiments on your checkout page, where the choice of payment methods often makes or breaks a sale. With this guide, you’ll see how data-driven insights from your own customer base can help you tailor the experience for Brazilian shoppers, boost conversion, and unlock new revenue opportunities.
Why Is A/B Testing Crucial for Cross-Border Merchants Selling to Brazil?
High-revenue businesses looking to scale further need to make data-driven decisions, and a practical way to do this is through A/B testing.
In the early stages of e-commerce, it’s common for merchants to make decisions based on their own knowledge of the market and the customers they’ve already gained. This knowledge is valuable for establishing a brand and building an initial customer base, but growing a business requires that strategic decisions go beyond the opinions of a founder or their team. That’s where the insights from A/B testing become essential.
Data-driven tests also help mitigate the risks associated with major changes. Before discontinuing a product or service, changing your website’s color scheme, or redesigning how your offerings are presented on your site, running an A/B test can reveal how your Brazilian audience responds, ensuring changes are guided by real insights rather than assumptions.
How Do You Prioritize and Run A/B Tests in Your E-Commerce Store?
The power of A/B testing in e-commerce grows when it becomes part of your day-to-day operations, truly embedding itself into your company’s culture. This doesn’t mean every strategic decision needs to be tested.
The goal is to ensure that, wherever there’s room to optimize processes, you and your team have the right framework and tools to make well-informed decisions.
Below, we highlight the A/B testing cycle, emphasizing how to weigh the effort required to run a test against the value of the insights it provides—particularly when adapting your strategy for Brazilian customers.
The A/B Testing Cycle: From Hypothesis to Analysis
To make experimentation part of your operations, it’s essential to understand A/B testing, its stages, and which tests are worth running.
Start with a clear business goal—like increasing clicks on a “Contact Us” button, reducing cart abandonment, or boosting engagement with emails. Then, formulate hypotheses to test. For example: “What if we send a reminder email for abandoned carts?” Part of your audience follows the original flow (“A”), while the other experiences the new version (“B”).
Before running a test, consider different hypotheses and evaluate them using the ICE framework: Impact (1–5) measures potential business effect, Confidence (1–5) measures data reliability, and Effort measures implementation work. Calculate ICE as (Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort to prioritize tests with the highest score.
Once the test is live, define a timeframe and analyze results in context—considering seasonality or behaviors specific to Brazilian shoppers—to make informed decisions. While technical details from data science can refine your tests further, even a structured, high-level approach like this ensures experimentation drives real, measurable value for your digital business.
What Can You Test to Optimize Conversion for Brazilian E-Commerce Customers?
Conversion is the result of multiple steps your potential customer takes before completing a purchase. This means you can run experiments throughout the customer journey, identifying where there’s room for improvement. Here are a few examples:
Testing Calls to Action (CTAs)
At every stage of the online shopping journey, customers need guidance toward the next action. Calls to Action (CTAs) are ideal for experimentation, as they usually require minimal effort to implement. You can test different elements of a CTA, such as the button text, its placement on a landing page, or the background color, among other variables.
It’s common to want to test multiple variables at once. While running more than one A/B test on the same element (like a checkout CTA) isn’t impossible, it’s crucial to use proper tools for traffic or customer segmentation and for analyzing results. Platforms like VWO (Visual Website Optimizer), AB Tasty, Optimizely, and Hotjar can help you measure what works best for Brazilian shoppers.
Testing Product Pages
What if your conversion is low because potential customers lose interest when they reach a product page? Is the product unclear, or is the main image failing to engage them?
Once you’ve formed your hypotheses, you can run A/B tests on your product page by changing visual elements—such as showing the product in use versus on a plain white background—or by varying the product description format, like using a short paragraph versus bullet-pointed technical details.
The placement and size of page elements can also be tested. For example, you could highlight customer reviews more prominently or add videos demonstrating how to use the product—especially effective for Brazilian shoppers, who often value trust-building elements like reviews and instructional content.
Testing Layout and Navigation
Beyond product pages, you can explore whether layout and navigation tests across your e-commerce site impact conversion rates.
For example, you might test how your product showcase is presented—should items be sorted by newest arrivals or bestsellers? You could experiment with the menu layout, horizontal versus vertical, or the size and prominence of the product search bar—elements that seem small but can make a notable impact on conversions.
Testing Payment Options at Checkout
When it comes to the checkout, payment options can have a big impact on conversion. A/B testing the placement of different methods—like listing Pix, Brazil’s instant payment method, before credit cards—can reveal which order leads to more completed purchases.
You can also experiment with how installment options are presented, given that paying in installments is an important part of the Brazilian payment landscape. For example, you could test whether “3x without interest” or “Split your payment into 3 installments” is more effective. These small adjustments can make a big difference for Brazilian shoppers, who often value flexibility and clarity in payment choices.
Testing Security Cues
For cross-border merchants selling to Brazil, building trust at checkout is crucial. One in five shoppers report having abandoned their cart due to a lack of trust in the checkout experience. With this in mind, you can run A/B tests to see which trust signals—like security badges, SSL icons, or “100% secure checkout” messaging—reduce cart abandonment.
You can also experiment with placement and prominence. For example, showing security badges near the payment options versus at the top of the checkout page may influence customer confidence differently. Testing these elements helps ensure your international business meets the expectations of Brazilian consumers and maximizes conversion.
Testing Based on Frequent Customer Data
If you already have reliable insights about your e-commerce’s most frequent buyers, you can experiment with personalization at checkout. For example, offering one-click payments like PagBrasil’s 1-Click Pix can speed up conversion and boost customer satisfaction.
Turn Data into Revenue
Digital merchants have a wide range of tools and strategies at their fingertips to make decisions based on insights—and, as a result, see positive effects on both revenue and recurring sales. In this article, we’ve explored A/B testing as one example, but it is far from the only way to build a data-driven culture.
If much of your Brazilian customer base shows recurring purchase behavior, for example, exploring subscription plans with Automatic Pix may be a smart next step. Or, if a large share of your traffic comes from iPhone users, enabling Apple Pay—something PagBrasil can help you do in just a few easy steps—can be a valuable investment.
Developing technologies that help e-commerce managers achieve success is part of our mission. You can count on our team of specialists to walk you through our solutions, designed to increase the intelligence of your operation and optimize your store’s conversion rates.
