There's a real cost to starting A/B testing too early, and it's not the one most people expect. It's not that testing is a bad idea, it's that testing without enough data behind it burns time and money on results you can't actually trust.

The threshold that actually matters: orders, not revenue

The number to watch is roughly 600 orders a month, which tends to line up with somewhere around $1M a year in revenue for most stores. Revenue is really just a proxy here, what actually determines whether testing works is order volume, because that's what determines whether a test can reach statistical significance in a reasonable timeframe.

A/B testing is simple in concept: you split your audience between two versions of your website, and you find out which one actually makes more money.

Half your traffic sees the version you already have. The other half sees a version with a specific change, That could be a new headline, a different navigation, whatever the hypothesis is.