# Buy 3 get 1 free ball offer in the cart drawer: -2.8% revenue/visitor

- Outcome: Lost
- Page type: Cart (Ecommerce)
- Elements: Cart drawers & slide carts, Upsells & cross-sells, Bundles & quantity breaks
- Test run by: [Convertibles](https://liftarchive.com/practitioners/convertibles/)
- Commentary by: LiftArchive (our analysis, not theirs)
- Original source: https://convertibles.dev/blogs/case-studies/buy-3-get-1-free-cart-offer-case-study
- Page: https://liftarchive.com/test/golf-cart-drawer-buy-3-get-1-ball-offer/

Adding a buy 3 dozen, get 1 dozen free golf ball offer to the cart drawer cut revenue per visitor by 2.8%, and only 2.3% of shoppers who saw it took the deal. Convertibles ran this test for a golf equipment brand over 19 days. The agency stopped it as not promising.

## Result

**-2.8% revenue/visitor**

- Revenue per visitor (shoppers who opened the cart): -2.8% against control. This is a loss.
- Take rate: 2.3%, or 94 of the 4,078 shoppers who saw the offer added it.
- Probability to beat control: 27%. Earlier in the test the gap was wider, about -8.5%, and it never turned positive.
- About 1,400 to 1,500 orders per version, so the flat-to-negative read is not just a lack of data.

## Control

Below the cart items, the drawer showed the store's existing upsell app widget.

## Variant

A 'Complete your setup' block replaced the widget. It showed the brand's golf balls with a photo, short pitch, three benefit bullets, the buy 3 get 1 free deal, a struck-through price, a per-ball price and a one-click add button.

## Why it likely lost (our reading)

- Three dozen balls is a sizeable purchase on its own. Asking for it on top of a club order adds a second big decision right before checkout.
- The same deal already existed on the ball's product page, so shoppers who wanted balls had a way to get it.
- The offer replaced an upsell widget that was already doing some work, so the test was offer versus widget, not offer versus nothing.

## Caveats

The variant was tested against an existing upsell widget, not an empty drawer. The test ran 19 days and was stopped early as not promising.

## How to run this test

- Hypothesis: If we show a multi-buy offer for a related product in the cart drawer, then revenue per visitor will rise because shoppers can add the deal in one click before checkout.
- Primary metric: Revenue per visitor among shoppers who open the cart
- Guardrail: Conversion rate
- Guardrail: Offer take rate
- Guardrail: Average order value
- Who should test it: Stores where the add-on is small and closely tied to what is already in the cart. It probably will not work when the offer is a large purchase in its own right, or when the same deal already sits on the product page.

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Credit: Convertibles ran this test and owns the result. Summary and commentary by LiftArchive (https://liftarchive.com/test/golf-cart-drawer-buy-3-get-1-ball-offer/).
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.