$5 price cut on a bottle: more orders, lower profit per visitor
Test run byElevate_abTesting and CRO tool
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsLowering the price of Biddlebee's hydration bottle from $29.95 to $24.95 raised conversion from 2.38% to 3.24%, but profit per visitor fell from $0.28 to $0.23 (about -18%).
Biddlebee, a hydration products brand, ran the test with the Elevate A/B Testing app, and it was published as an Elevate A/B success story. The brand kept the original price.
- Conversion rate: 2.38% at $29.95 vs 3.24% at $24.95. More people bought, with 140 orders vs 194.
- Revenue per visitor: $1.02 vs $0.95. The cheaper price earned less per visitor, a loss.
- Profit per visitor: $0.28 vs $0.23, about 18% lower for the variant, based on an $18 unit cost the brand gave.
- The source headline cites 21.74%. That is how much more profit the original price made, not a gain from the change.
The change
The bottle price drops by $5, from $29.95 to $24.95.
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
The hydration bottle, one of Biddlebee's best-sellers, was priced at $29.95.
Variant
The same bottle was priced at $24.95, $5 less.
Why it likely lost
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- With an $18 cost, the $5 cut took profit per bottle from $11.95 to $6.95, a drop of about 42%.
- Orders rose by about a third, which was not enough to make up for the thinner margin.
- The original price seems to have been acceptable to most buyers already, so the discount mostly gave money away.
Caveats: Profit per visitor uses the $18 unit cost the brand stated. The test had 11,872 visitors, but no duration or significance level was shared.
Who ran it
Elevate_ab ran this test for Biddlebee and published the results (Elevate A/B success story). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on Elevate_ab →
How to run this test on your store
- Hypothesis
- If we lower the price of a best-seller, then profit per visitor will rise, because extra orders will outweigh the smaller margin on each one.
- Primary metric
- Profit per visitor
- Guardrails
- Revenue per visitor
- Conversion rate
- Average order value
- Who should test it
- Any store considering a permanent price cut, especially with thin margins. If you can't estimate unit cost, judge on revenue per visitor, never conversion rate alone.
Questions
Why can a price cut lose money even if sales go up?
Each sale earns less. At Biddlebee, orders rose but profit per visitor fell from $0.28 to $0.23.
How do I calculate profit per visitor?
Multiply conversion rate by profit per order, or divide total profit by visitors.
You need a reliable unit cost for this.
Should I ever judge a price test on conversion rate?
Not on its own. A lower price nearly always converts better, so use revenue or profit per visitor.
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