Where Should I Start with Price Testing?

You need to pick a starting point for price testing. Here's the fastest way to learn something meaningful: start with your best-selling collection.

Let's explore why this works and how to run a simple test that gives you confident answers fast.

How Do I Identify the Most Impactful Starting Point?

High traffic, clear margins, meaningful impact

The temptation is to test everything. Your homepage hero. Your product detail pages. Every collection. Every price point. But spreading your testing thin means waiting months for answers that might not even be actionable.

Your first test should teach you something fast and meaningful. Pick wrong, and you'll spend weeks gathering data on a product that barely moves the needle. Pick right, and you'll have clear insights in days that immediately impact your bottom line.

The best starting point isn't obvious until you know what to look for. Most brands look at their analytics and see hundreds of products, dozens of collections, and endless combinations. Where do you even begin?

Three criteria matter:

Sufficient traffic. More visitors means faster results. You need enough data to see clear patterns emerge. Low-traffic products leave you waiting months.

Clear margin requirements. You need to know your boundaries. Your finance team likely has minimum margin thresholds you need to maintain. Testing products with murky margins makes it hard to act on results.

Meaningful business impact. Testing a product that generates 2% of revenue won't move the needle. Focus on products that matter to your bottom line.

If In Doubt, Start with Your Best-Selling Collection

Fast signal with clear constraints

Your best-selling collection typically hits all three criteria.

You get signal fast. High traffic means patterns emerge in days or weeks, not months. You can act on insights while they're fresh.

Margins are established. Best-sellers have clear cost structures and margin requirements. You know your boundaries. You can test confidently within constraints your business needs.

Results matter. These products drive meaningful revenue. Optimizing them impacts your bottom line immediately.

You build confidence. Your first test teaches you how price testing works. Starting with high-traffic collections means you'll see clear results fast, building confidence for future tests.

A Simple Place to Start: The Straddle Test

Test prices on both sides of your current price

Let's say you sell alpaca sweaters at $150. You don't have a strong reason to believe $150 is too high or too low. Maybe you picked it because it felt right, or because your margin math worked out, or because competitors were in that range. The honest truth: you're not certain. So you're going to explore.

The straddle approach:

Look a little bit left, a little bit right. Test 5-10% up and down from your current price.

10% of $150 = $15

Your test prices:

• Low side: $135-139

• Control: $150 (current price)

• High side: $165-169

Why 5-10%?

Big enough to see clear results quickly. Small enough to stay reasonable. You picked $150 for a reason - you're not jumping to $250 overnight.

Set up your ABC test:

Split traffic evenly across three groups. Every visitor to your site is randomly assigned to see one of the three prices. This gives you a true apples-to-apples comparison across the same time period with no seasonality bias.

What to track:

Don't get lost in vanity metrics. Four numbers tell you everything you need to know:

• Conversion rate: How many visitors buy

• Average order value: How much they spend

• Revenue per visitor: Conversion × AOV

• Profit per visitor: Revenue minus costs per visitor

Profit per visitor is your North Star. You might grow revenue while compressing margins so much that profit goes down. A 5% conversion drop with 15% higher prices often increases profit. Only profit per visitor tells you if you're actually winning.

Run for 2-3 weeks. Check daily to ensure things run smoothly. Watch for patterns to stabilize and tell a consistent story day after day.

Different days of the week expose your test to different variables: Monday might be payday for many customers, Tuesday might see a competitor's promotion, weekends might bring different shopping behavior. This full weekly cycle gives you confidence when results converge.

Example outcome:

Let's say $135 wins. The lower price drove significantly more conversion, maximizing profit per visitor even with lower margins per unit.

You could run another straddle around $135 (like $129 and $139) to see if there's a magical nonlinear effect at certain price points. Or you could take the win and move to testing your alpaca pajamas.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Don't start here

I've seen brands waste months on their first price test because they picked the wrong starting point. The data eventually comes in, but by then momentum is gone, stakeholders have moved on, and the window to act on insights has closed.

These mistakes are seductive because they seem logical in the moment. Testing a new product launch? Sounds strategic. Testing during your Black Friday sale? Seems efficient. But each of these approaches introduces variables that muddy your results and delay your learning.

Starting with low-traffic products. You'll wait months for clear answers. Start with best-sellers for quick learnings.

Testing products with margin uncertainty. If you're not clear on your cost structure or minimum thresholds, testing becomes risky. Know your boundaries first.

Testing brand-new products. No baseline data means no context. You don't know normal performance, making test results hard to interpret.

Testing highly seasonal items. Winter coats in July gives you skewed data. Test during consistent demand patterns.

Testing during sales or promotions. Promotional periods skew results. Run tests during normal shopping periods.

Testing too many things at once. Your first test should be focused. One collection. Clear results. Build from there.

Changing mid-test. You invalidate everything. Let tests run their course.

Ignoring profit per visitor. Revenue alone misleads. Always measure profit per visitor.

Stop Guessing. Start Testing.

Your best-selling collection gives you the fastest path to meaningful learning. High traffic delivers fast results. Established margins give you clear constraints. Meaningful revenue makes optimization worth it.

Start here:

• Pick your best-selling collection

• Run a straddle test (5-10% up and down)

• Track profit per visitor

• Run 2-3 weeks until patterns stabilize

• Act on what you learn

You don't need to test everything. You need to start where you'll get clear answers fast.

Ready to discover what your customers will actually pay? When you're ready to know for sure, let's get you testing beyond what's typical.