# 'Highly Rated' badge on well-reviewed products: +1.98% add to cart

- Outcome: Won
- Page type: Product page (Ecommerce)
- Elements: Bestseller badges & product labels, Reviews & star ratings
- Test run by: [Optimizely](https://liftarchive.com/practitioners/optimizely/)
- Commentary by: LiftArchive (our analysis, not theirs)
- Original source: https://www.optimizely.com/field-notes/articles/experimentation-use-cases-retail-product-page
- Page: https://liftarchive.com/test/optimizely-retailer-highly-rated-badge/

Adding 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.

## Result

**+1.98% add to cart**

- 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.

## 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)

- 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.

## How to run this test

- 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
- Guardrail: Purchase conversion rate
- Guardrail: Revenue per visitor
- Guardrail: 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.

---

Credit: Optimizely ran this test and owns the result. Summary and commentary by LiftArchive (https://liftarchive.com/test/optimizely-retailer-highly-rated-badge/).
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.