# '$16.50 off' vs '21% off' on an upsell: +$0.20 per visitor

- Outcome: Won
- Page type: Post-purchase (Ecommerce)
- Elements: Upsells & cross-sells, Pricing, discounts & savings display
- Test run by: [Ezra Firestone](https://liftarchive.com/practitioners/ezra-firestone/)
- Commentary by: LiftArchive (our analysis, not theirs)
- Original source: https://zipify.com/winning-upsell-split-test-discounting-dollar-amount-vs-percentage/
- Page: https://liftarchive.com/test/gap-boom-upsell-dollar-vs-percent-off-trio/

Showing 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.

## Result

**+$0.20 per visitor**

- 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.

## 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)

- 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.

## How to run this test

- 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
- Guardrail: Upsell take rate
- Guardrail: Average upsell order value
- Guardrail: 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.

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Credit: Ezra Firestone ran this test and owns the result. Summary and commentary by LiftArchive (https://liftarchive.com/test/gap-boom-upsell-dollar-vs-percent-off-trio/).
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.