Ship-date message on product pages: -6.9% conversion
Test run byClean CommitCRO agency
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsAdding a box to every product page saying when orders would ship cut conversion rate 6.9% and orders 6.1%.
Clean Commit ran this test for an anonymized Shopify store and published it in its A/B test library.
The drop was not significant, but the original was likely better, so the change did not ship.
- Conversion rate: -6.9%. The original had a 91.6% probability of being better, but the result was not significant.
- Orders: -6.1%, and revenue per visitor fell 5.2%.
- Average order value: +1.8%, not enough to offset fewer orders.
- Mobile took most of the hit: conversion fell 9.4% on mobile and 1.8% on desktop.
The change
The variant adds a box stating when orders are expected to ship.
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
Product pages showed no information about when orders would ship.
Variant
A raised box with slightly rounded corners on every product page stated when orders were expected to ship. The message was the same for all products.
Why it likely lost
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- If the stated ship date felt slow, it may have raised a worry shoppers did not have before.
- A single message for all products may not have matched what shoppers expected for each item.
- On mobile, an extra box near the buy area may have pushed the add-to-cart button further down.
Caveats: 21,816 visitors over 24 days, and the drop was not significant. The source page URL mentions checkout, but the test was a product page shipping message.
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 tell shoppers on the product page when their order will ship, then more will buy because they know what to expect.
- Primary metric
- Conversion rate
- Guardrails
- Mobile conversion rate
- Revenue per visitor
- Add-to-cart rate
- Who should test it
- Stores with fast, reliable dispatch that beats competitors. If your shipping times are average or slow, stating them up front may hurt, as it seems to have here.
Questions
Does showing shipping times on product pages help sales?
Not always. In this test it cut conversion 6.9%, likely because the timing did not reassure shoppers.
Should ship dates be the same for every product?
This test used one message for all products.
Product-specific dates may be more useful, but test them before rolling out.
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