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Touchpoint Newsletter

Dear reader,

Back in my youth, my dad would sometimes take me and my siblings out on the lake in a Sunfish sailboat. One day, he thought my sister and I should give it a try ourselves, and let me tell you, for the first twenty minutes or so of our odyssey, we felt fairly certain we'd meet the same fate as The Wreck at Cape Gelidonya.

There's an old saying in sailing: you can't control the wind, but you can adjust your sails. It sounds like a trite motivational poster until you're actually on a sailboat and realize it's just... practical advice. (We wound up managing to get the Sunfish across the lake, no wreckage.) 

Testing is the ecommerce version of that. You can't control what your customers do, but you can keep adjusting until you understand their preferences and habits. The brands that do this well have built a habit of questioning their assumptions before they become expensive ones.

That's what this issue is about. We're covering where checkout drop-off really comes from, how to stop filling your test backlog with the wrong questions, and what it looks like when a team finally stops guessing and starts learning.


Ahoy me hearties, 

Alanna

Insights 💡

Calling everything a "test" is quietly killing your testing program 

 

It's smart to have an experimentation culture in place for your business — running tests, comparing variants, and tracking results can reveal plenty of areas to improve on. But there's a subtle way the whole thing tends to work against itself: when every change (or potential change) gets labeled an experiment, your most strategic test slots fill up with button colors and headline tweaks, and the high-impact bets never get their turn.

CXL's breakdown of growth experiments vs. optimization draws a few helpful lines that'll change the way your team prioritizes everything.

Here are some of the most common pitfalls:

  • Conflating optimization with experimentation creates a bottleneck. If your testing tool can only handle a handful of concurrent experiments, filling those slots with low-stakes changes means strategic tests around pricing, value proposition, or core funnel structure are perpetually waiting in line. That delay compounds.
    • Pro-tip: Rebuy has a built-in A/B testing tool designed specifically for on-site widgets — so you can test widget variations, different data sources, or even widget vs. no widget at all, without relying on a separate testing platform. Setup takes less than 5 minutes, and once a test concludes, the winning variant automatically takes over for all incoming traffic. 
  • There's a useful middle ground most teams skip. For ideas with real uncertainty that don't yet warrant full test traffic, lean validation — mockups, direct user feedback, small-scale qualitative input — can answer the question faster and cheaper than a formal A/B test.
  • "Experimentation culture" can become a label, not a practice. Many organizations embrace the framing but dilute its value by calling every change an experiment, which creates the appearance of rigor without the results.

What this means: Build a tiered testing backlog. Obvious fixes get shipped, real hypotheses get tested, and high-uncertainty bets get validated before they take a slot. Not everything deserves the same treatment.

    70% of carts go nowhere. Most of the friction is fixable 👀


    According to Baymard Institute's analysis of 50 studies, the average cart abandonment rate sits at around 70%, meaning roughly seven out of every ten shoppers who add items to a cart never complete their purchase.

    TechRepublic's checkout optimization guide walks through where friction actually lives in the checkout flow and how to start testing your way out of it systematically.

    Here are some of the most common findings.

    • The payment step is the highest-anxiety moment and the most under-optimized. Most stores place trust and security signals in the footer, which makes them hard to notice at exactly the moment customers need them most. Moving them closer to the payment fields is one of the simplest, most testable changes you can make. 
    • Fewer pages almost always wins. One brand's biggest single conversion improvement came from collapsing a three-page checkout into one — no personalization engine required, just less friction between intent and purchase. 
    • You're probably not testing on the right device. Mobile accounts for over 60% of ecommerce traffic globally, yet desktop still converts at roughly twice the mobile rate for most stores. A big part of that gap traces back to QA on flagship phones over WiFi — not the mid-range Android on a 4G connection your actual customer is using.

    What this means: If checkout is the last place a customer can say no, it deserves to be the first place you test.

    Events 🎉

     

    Shoptalk Barcelona 🇪🇸 

    June 9-13, Fira Gran Via, Barcelona 

    Shoptalk Europe brings together retail and ecommerce leaders at Fira Gran Via for three days of keynotes, structured networking, and conversations about where commerce is actually heading.

    It's one of the bigger gatherings on the European calendar. If your team is thinking about international growth or just wants a pulse check on what the rest of the industry is working on, it's a good room to be in.

    Check it out here.

    Sunset Sessions - Shoptalk EU
    June 9, Moll De Les Drassanes, Barcelona 

    If you’re heading to Shoptalk Europe, we wanted to invite you to something a little more memorable than another crowded happy hour. Rebuy is teaming up with Domaine, Shopify, Klaviyo, and Bold Metrics for Sunset Sessions — an invite-only sunset cruise along the Barcelona coastline with a curated group of ecommerce leaders.

    We’ll head out from the harbor at 6:30 PM and cruise into golden hour with cocktails, canapés, a live DJ, and plenty of space to actually connect with people outside the chaos of the conference floor. Save your spot here! 

    Poolside Mornings - Shoptalk EU
    June 10, Fira Gran Via, Barcelona 

    Rebuy is teaming up with Domaine, Shopify, Klaviyo, and Recharge for a poolside morning at Hotel SB Plaça Europa, just a few minutes from Fira Gran Via.

     

    From 8:30–11:00 CEST, we’re bringing together a small group of ecommerce leaders for good coffee, breakfast, smoothies, and a chance to connect before another busy day at the conference.

     

    And because conference weeks are a marathon, not a sprint, we’ll have optional recovery experiences on-site too — including massage therapists, Hyperice stations, and a physio team.

    If you’ll be in Barcelona, we’d love to have you there. Sign up here. 

    Quick hits ⚡️

    • Google just made video creation conversational
      At I/O 2026, Google unveiled Gemini Omni Flash, a multimodal model that generates and edits video from any combination of text, image, audio, and video inputs, now rolling out to Gemini app users and YouTube Shorts. For ecommerce brands, the barrier to producing product video content just got a lot lower, and that has real implications for how quickly teams can test creative at scale.

       

    • The shoppers coming from AI search are already sold
      Shopify's Q1 2026 data found that visitors arriving via AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini are meaningfully more valuable than organic search traffic. AI-referred sessions convert at nearly 50% higher rates and carry 14% higher average order values — largely because more than half of those sessions start directly on a product detail page, arriving ready to buy rather than still in research mode. For brands investing in their PDP experience, this is a good reminder of why that work compounds.

       

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