Cart icon on the add-to-cart button: -10.6% conversion rate
Test run byClean CommitCRO agency
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsAdding a small cart icon to the add-to-cart button lowered conversion rate by 10.6% and orders by 11.9%.
Clean Commit ran this test on product pages for an anonymized Shopify store and published it in its A/B test library.
The sample was small, so the drop is a warning sign rather than a proven loss.
- Conversion rate: -10.6%. Fewer visitors who saw the icon went on to buy.
- Orders: -11.9%, and revenue per visitor: -9.5%. Every sales metric moved the wrong way.
- Average order value: +1.2%, so buyers spent about the same per order.
- Mobile conversion rate fell 13.1%, the bigger drop of the two device types.
- Not significant: the original had a 73.8% probability of being better, well short of a confident call.
The change
The variant adds a cart icon to the add-to-cart button.
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
The product page had a standard add-to-cart button with text only.
Variant
The same button with a cart icon added next to the text. Nothing else on the page changed.
Why it likely lost
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- Shoppers already know what an add-to-cart button looks like, so the icon added nothing they needed.
- An icon can make the button look busier or closer to the header cart link, which may blur its purpose.
- On small mobile buttons, an icon takes space from the text and can make the label harder to read.
- Part of the drop may simply be noise, given the small sample.
Caveats: The test ran 16 days on 5,609 visitors and was far from statistical significance. Results are reported by the agency that ran the test.
Who ran it
Clean Commit ran this test for a Shopify store (anonymized) and published the results (Clean Commit A/B test library). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on Clean Commit →
How to run this test on your store
- Hypothesis
- If we add a cart icon to the add-to-cart button, then more shoppers will add to cart because the button will be quicker to recognize.
- Primary metric
- Conversion rate
- Guardrails
- Add-to-cart rate
- Revenue per visitor
- Mobile conversion rate
- Who should test it
- Stores whose add-to-cart button is unusual in style or hard to spot. If your button already looks like a standard buy button, this test is unlikely to help and may hurt.
Questions
Should I put an icon on my add-to-cart button?
Not by default. In this test the icon lowered conversion rate by 10.6%, though the result was not significant. Test it before rolling it out.
Do small button changes really affect sales?
They can, in either direction. Small changes also produce small effects that need a lot of traffic to measure, so a low-traffic test like this one gives only a hint.
Why test something that seems obvious?
Because obvious-looking changes can backfire. This one was meant to make the button clearer and every sales metric fell instead.
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