'$16.50 off' vs '21% off' on an upsell: +$0.20 per visitor
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsShowing a post-purchase upsell discount as "$16.50 off" instead of "21% off" earned $0.20 more per upsell page visitor.
Ezra Firestone ran the test on the BOOM! by Cindy Joseph store's Boomstick Trio funnel and published it on the Zipify blog.
The 21% offer actually saved buyers slightly more.
- Revenue per upsell page visitor: +$0.20 for the dollar-off version.
- The baseline revenue per visit, take rates and visitor counts were not shared, so the size of the lift in percent is unknown.
- The same post reports two more tests on other products where dollar-off framing also won.
The change
Only the discount wording changes: percent off vs dollar off.
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
After buying a Boomstick Trio, buyers were offered one more Trio at "21% savings".
Variant
The same offer was framed as "$16.50 off", a slightly smaller saving. The rest of the page was identical.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- A dollar figure is concrete. Buyers don't have to work out what 21% means in money.
- For a product at this price, the dollar number may look bigger than the percent number at a glance.
- Everything else on the page stayed the same, so the framing is the most likely cause.
Caveats: Run by Zipify's founder on the founder's own store and published by Zipify. No sample size, base rate or confidence level was shared.
Who ran it
Ezra Firestone ran this test for BOOM! by Cindy Joseph and published the results (Zipify blog). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on Ezra Firestone →
How to run this test on your store
- Hypothesis
- If we show the upsell discount as a dollar amount instead of a percentage, then revenue per visit will rise because a concrete saving feels larger.
- Primary metric
- Revenue per upsell page visitor
- Guardrails
- Upsell take rate
- Average upsell order value
- Margin per upsell order
- Who should test it
- Stores with mid-priced products where the dollar saving is a sizeable number. On cheap items a dollar figure can look small next to a percentage, so the result may flip.
Questions
Is dollar off or percent off better for discounts?
It depends on price. A common rule of thumb is that dollar amounts look bigger on higher-priced items and percentages look bigger on cheap ones, so test it on your own prices.
Did the dollar version give a bigger discount?
No. In this test the 21% offer saved buyers slightly more, yet the dollar framing still earned more per visitor.
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