Clearer subscribe-and-save selector: +12% revenue per visitor
Test run byConversion FanaticsCRO agency
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsRedesigning the subscribe-and-save options on a product page lifted revenue per visitor by 12% and sales by 7%.
Conversion Fanatics ran this test for a high-volume ecommerce store with auto-ship.
Several changes shipped together, so the gain belongs to the whole new layout, not one element.
- Revenue per visitor rose 12%, the main metric.
- Overall sales rose 7%, reported at 99% statistical significance.
- Products per visitor rose by over 9%, and the agency says bounce rate went down too (no figure shared).
The change
Clearer auto-ship selector, new defaults and a bigger add-to-cart button
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
The original page had a small 'deliver every' selector labelled 'Recurring', with extra 'see details' text. The quantity choices were also confusing, with several options to pick from.
Variant
The new layout made price and savings easier to see, swapped 'Recurring' for 'auto-ship' wording, made the add-to-cart button bigger and the delivery schedule easier to pick. One month and auto-ship were selected by default.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- Plain 'auto-ship' wording tells shoppers what they are signing up for. 'Recurring' is vaguer.
- Pre-selecting auto-ship and a one-month schedule likely pushed more people onto the subscription, which raises revenue per visitor.
- About 70% of traffic was mobile, so a small selector and button were probably hard to use. Bigger, clearer controls cut that friction.
Caveats: This was a bundled test: copy, layout, button size and default selections all changed at once, so no single change can take the credit. The data is from 2017.
Who ran it
Conversion Fanatics ran this test for a high-volume ecommerce store with auto-ship and published the results (Conversion Fanatics blog case study). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on Conversion Fanatics →
How to run this test on your store
- Hypothesis
- If we make the subscription option clearer, call it auto-ship and pre-select it, then revenue per visitor will rise because shoppers understand the offer and face fewer choices.
- Primary metric
- Revenue per visitor
- Guardrails
- Subscription cancellation rate in the first 60 days
- Refund and chargeback rate
- Add-to-cart rate on mobile
- Who should test it
- Stores selling consumables with a subscribe-and-save option, especially with heavy mobile traffic. It matters less if few products are bought on repeat, and defaults that push subscriptions can raise churn if shoppers feel tricked.
Questions
Should auto-ship be the default option on a product page?
In this test, making auto-ship and a one-month schedule the default was part of a winning layout.
Watch cancellations and complaints, since a default only helps if subscribers stay.
Is 'auto-ship' better wording than 'recurring'?
This store switched to 'auto-ship' as part of a bundle that won, so the wording alone wasn't isolated.
Clear words that say what will happen tend to be safer than jargon.
How big a sample do you need for a test like this?
This one had over 40,000 unique visitors and over 2,000 sales.
Smaller stores may need to run longer to reach a reliable result.
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