'Our Pick' badge on product images: +1.2% add to cart
Test run byOptimizelyTesting and CRO tool
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsOverlaying an 'Our Pick' badge on images of popular items on category pages raised add-to-cart rate by 1.2%, but purchases did not change significantly.
Optimizely ran the test for an online retailer and published it as an Optimizely Field Notes use case.
A 'Featured' badge was also tested, and 'Our Pick' did better.
- Add-to-cart rate: +1.2%. This is the headline number.
- Checkout clickthrough rate: +1.3%.
- 'Our Pick' did better than 'Featured', though the gap between them was not shared.
- Purchases: no significant change. The badge moved early-funnel behavior, not final sales.
The change
Popular items get an 'Our Pick' badge on the product image.
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
Product images on category pages had no badge overlay. A 'Featured' badge was tested as another version.
Variant
Popular items carried an 'Our Pick' badge overlaid on the product image.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- 'Our Pick' reads as a personal recommendation from the store, which may carry more weight than a neutral label.
- 'Featured' can look like paid placement, so shoppers may give it less trust.
- A badge on the image is seen while scanning the grid, before shoppers read any text.
- Purchases stayed flat, perhaps because the badge shaped which item shoppers chose but not whether they bought.
Caveats: Anonymized vendor summary with no sample size, duration or confidence level, and the exact test arms were not described. 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 overlay an 'Our Pick' badge on images of popular items, then add-to-cart rate will rise because shoppers trust a store's own recommendation.
- Primary metric
- Add-to-cart rate
- Guardrails
- Purchase conversion rate
- Revenue per visitor
- Clicks on unbadged products
- Who should test it
- Retailers with large category pages where shoppers need help choosing. Test the badge wording too, as this test shows the label matters. Small catalogs with few choices will see less effect.
Questions
Which badge wording works best on product images?
In this test, 'Our Pick' did better than 'Featured'.
Wording that sounds like a store recommendation may earn more trust than a generic label.
Do badges on product cards increase purchases?
Here they raised add-to-cart and checkout clicks but not purchases. Measure sales before rolling out.
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