'Highly Rated' badge on well-reviewed products: +1.98% add to cart
Test run byOptimizelyTesting and CRO tool
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsAdding a 'Highly Rated' badge to products with strong reviews raised add-to-cart rate by 1.98%, but purchases did not change significantly.
Optimizely ran the test for an online retailer and published it as an Optimizely Field Notes use case.
Treat it as an early-funnel win, not a sales win.
- Add to cart: +1.98%. This is the headline number.
- Product page views: +0.27%, a very small gain.
- Purchase conversion: no significant change. The badge moved early behavior, not final sales.
- Optimizely says the gains on badged items were large enough to lift add-to-cart across the whole catalog.
The change
Well-reviewed items get a 'Highly Rated' badge; everything else is unchanged.
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
Products appeared on product and listing pages with no badge calling out their reviews.
Variant
Items with positive customer reviews carried a 'Highly Rated' badge.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- A badge is a quick shortcut: shoppers don't need to read reviews to see a product is well liked.
- It pulls attention toward proven products, which are more likely to be added to cart.
- Purchases stayed flat, perhaps because the badge helped shoppers choose a product but did nothing about price, shipping or checkout.
Caveats: Anonymized vendor summary with no sample size, duration or confidence level shared. The purchase effect was not significant.
Who ran it
Optimizely ran this test for an online retailer (Optimizely customer) and published the results (Optimizely Field Notes use case). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on Optimizely →
How to run this test on your store
- Hypothesis
- If we add a 'Highly Rated' badge to products with strong reviews, then add-to-cart rate will rise because shoppers can spot proven products at a glance.
- Primary metric
- Add-to-cart rate
- Guardrails
- Purchase conversion rate
- Revenue per visitor
- Add to cart on unbadged products
- Who should test it
- Retailers with large catalogs and enough reviews to badge a real share of products. Stores with few reviews, or where most products would qualify, will see little difference.
Questions
Do product badges increase sales?
They can increase add-to-cart, as here. In this test purchases did not change significantly, so check sales, not just clicks.
What threshold should a 'Highly Rated' badge use?
The source does not say what counted as highly rated.
Pick a rule that combines star rating and review count, so a product with two five-star reviews doesn't qualify.
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