# Removing a membership banner from the cart: +$5.5M revenue

- Outcome: Won
- Page type: Cart (Ecommerce)
- Elements: Layout, fonts & visual design
- 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-checkout-pages
- Page: https://liftarchive.com/test/optimizely-retailer-remove-cart-membership-banner/

Removing a banner promoting a membership program from the cart page kept shoppers focused on buying, worth an estimated $5.5M in incremental revenue. Optimizely ran the test for an online retailer and published it as an Optimizely Field Notes use case. The trade-off: new membership sign-ups fell significantly.

## Result

**+$5.5M revenue**

- Incremental revenue: about +$5.5M, as estimated by Optimizely. No conversion rate figure was shared.
- Removing the banner kept shoppers more focused on completing their purchase.
- Copy-only version: no meaningful effect. Rewording the banner was not enough.
- New memberships: fell significantly. This is a real cost to weigh against the revenue gain.

## Control

The cart page showed a banner promoting the retailer's membership program.

## Variant

The membership banner was removed from the cart page. A second version kept the banner and only changed its copy.

## Why it likely won (our reading)

- In the cart, shoppers are close to buying, and a banner for something else gives them a reason to click away.
- Removing the banner leaves checkout as the obvious next step.
- Rewording didn't help because the problem was the distraction itself, not the message.

## Caveats

Anonymized vendor summary. The revenue figure is Optimizely's estimate; no sample size, duration, conversion rate change or membership figures were shared.

## How to run this test

- Hypothesis: If we remove the membership promo banner from the cart page, then more shoppers will complete checkout because nothing pulls their attention away from the purchase.
- Primary metric: Checkout completion rate
- Guardrail: New membership sign-ups
- Guardrail: Revenue per visitor
- Guardrail: Long-term value of members
- Who should test it: Retailers promoting loyalty programs, credit cards or other offers in the cart. If members are worth much more over time, value the lost sign-ups before shipping, or move the offer to the thank-you page.

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Credit: Optimizely ran this test and owns the result. Summary and commentary by LiftArchive (https://liftarchive.com/test/optimizely-retailer-remove-cart-membership-banner/).
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.