# Recently viewed products section: +1.0% conversion, inconclusive

- Outcome: Flat / inconclusive
- Page type: Product page (Ecommerce)
- Elements: Product cards & quick add
- Test run by: [Clean Commit](https://liftarchive.com/practitioners/clean-commit/)
- Commentary by: LiftArchive (our analysis, not theirs)
- Original source: https://cleancommit.io/ab-tests/recently-viewed-products-section/
- Page: https://liftarchive.com/test/cleancommit-recently-viewed-products-section/

Adding a recently viewed products section for returning visitors raised conversion rate by just 1.0%, too small to call, so the result is inconclusive. Clean Commit ran this test for an anonymized Shopify store and published it in its A/B test library. Shoppers browsed more, but add-to-cart rate did not move.

## Result

**+1.0% conversion, inconclusive**

- Conversion rate: +1.0%, with a 71.2% probability of beating the original. Within normal variation.
- Revenue per visitor: +1.7%, also too small to call.
- Click-through rate: +4.9%, and bounce rate fell 5.7%, so more visitors kept browsing.
- Add-to-cart rate: -0.1%, flat. More browsing did not lead to more items in the cart.

## Control

Product pages with no recently viewed section.

## Variant

Returning visitors saw a recently viewed section listing three to six products they had browsed before. Visitors with no browsing history did not see it.

## Why it likely came out this way (our reading)

- Returning shoppers may already find past products easily through search, menus or their browser history.
- The section helps shoppers revisit items, but it does not give them a new reason to buy.
- The section only showed for returning visitors with history, so most traffic may have been unaffected.

## Caveats

The test ran on 97,250 visitors over 35 days and still could not detect a clear effect on sales.

## How to run this test

- Hypothesis: If we show returning visitors their recently viewed products, then conversion rate will rise because picking up where they left off takes less effort.
- Primary metric: Conversion rate among returning visitors
- Guardrail: Add-to-cart rate
- Guardrail: Revenue per visitor
- Guardrail: Page load speed
- Who should test it: Stores with large catalogs and many returning visitors who compare products over several visits. Stores with small catalogs probably will not see much change.

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Credit: Clean Commit ran this test and owns the result. Summary and commentary by LiftArchive (https://liftarchive.com/test/cleancommit-recently-viewed-products-section/).
Usage: Free to use, quote and build on, with credit and a link: name the practitioner or organization that ran the test and link to its LiftArchive page. The results belong to the practitioners who ran and shared them; the summaries and commentary are LiftArchive's.