Step One Life · AU · Jan – Feb 2026
A deliberately blunt intervention on campaign landing pages: take the number out of the above-the-fold experience and let the value proposition work first. It produced +42.8% conversion at >99.99% confidence — the largest single effect in the programme.
conversion rate lift, >99.99% confidence
revenue per visitor
more revenue, from slightly fewer visitors
average order value — the accepted trade-off
Contents
Step One runs campaign landing pages for limited-edition colourway drops ("LECs") — short, high-intent campaign pages that send paid and email traffic to a specific product release. These pages are built by me, not handed over by an agency, which means the page structure itself is a variable I can test.
The observation behind the test was a familiar one in DTC: the price lands before the value does. On a campaign landing page, a visitor arriving from a paid ad or an email sees a price figure before they have had any chance to understand what they are buying. For a considered purchase — and underwear is more considered than it looks — that creates sticker shock before desire has been built.
The hypothesis:
If we remove the price from the landing page, there will be less sticker shock, so conversion rate will increase.
This was a deliberately blunt intervention. Not a price change, not a discount, not a payment-plan mechanic — simply removing the number from the above-the-fold experience and letting the value proposition do its work first.
Platform: Shoplift, landing page test on the LEC experience. Window: 13–15 February 2026, launched alongside the Shredders limited-edition drop. Statistics: two-proportion significance test on conversion rate and add-to-cart rate; zero-inflated test on revenue per visitor. 95% confidence threshold. Guardrail: AOV was tracked explicitly, because removing price visibility is exactly the kind of change that can lift conversion while quietly degrading order value.
The comparison test in this case study is the opposite kind of change: a competitor-focused funnel (AU_CLP_CVR_260127, SO vs Cotton v2) that increased the amount of persuasion on the page. Reading the two together is the point — one removed information, one added it, and the outcomes were dramatically different.
AU_CLP_CVR_260214 | 13–16 Feb 2026| Metric | Change | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| Visitors | ~7.6k total | ⚠ moderate traffic imbalance |
| Conversion Rate | +42.8% | >99.99% confidence |
| Revenue Per Visitor | +35.6% | — |
| Revenue | +28.6% | — |
| Conversions | +35.5% | — |
| Orders | +36.4% | — |
| Add to Cart Rate | +17.0% | 99.24% confidence |
| Clickthrough Rate | +18.4% | >99.99% confidence |
| Average Order Value | −5.8% | — |
A +42.8% conversion lift at >99.99% confidence — by a wide margin the largest single effect in the entire CRO programme. The variant generated over a third more conversions and 28.6% more revenue, from slightly fewer visitors.
And it did it by moving the whole funnel, not just the last step. Clickthrough rate up 18.4% and add-to-cart rate up 17.0% both reached significance. That's the signature of a page that engages people on arrival: removing the price didn't rescue hesitant shoppers at the checkout, it stopped them bouncing before they had a reason to care.
The honest caveat: AOV fell 5.8%. Removing price visibility from above the fold did pull in slightly smaller baskets. But RPV still rose 35.6% and revenue rose 28.6%, so the conversion gain dwarfed the basket compression by a wide margin — the trade-off was worth taking, and I'd take it again.
The device split reinforced the pattern: mobile CVR jumped ~50% and mobile RPV rose ~38%, while desktop also improved but more modestly (CVR +15%, RPV +25%). Mobile carried the result, which matters because it's where the traffic is.
AU_CLP_CVR_260127 | 27 Jan – 12 Feb 2026The same class of page, the opposite intervention: a competitor-comparison funnel that added persuasive content.
| Metric | Change |
|---|---|
| Visitors | ~1.8k total |
| Conversion Rate | −7.1% |
| Revenue Per Visitor | −17.5% |
| Average Order Value | −13.0% |
| Revenue | −17.1% |
Rejected. The competitor-focused funnel lost on conversion and on order value — AOV down 13% and RPV down 17.5%. Mobile, which dominates traffic, followed the same pattern: the variant improved clickthrough and add-to-cart slightly, then dropped off at conversion and AOV.
The read: the competitor framing didn't increase persuasion, it added distraction. This is a directional loss on a small sample (~1.8k visitors), and I treated it as such — but the direction was consistent enough across metrics to justify not shipping it.
1. Removing friction beat adding persuasion. The two tests on the same class of page point in opposite directions. The page that removed information (price) gained 42.8% conversion. The page that added information (competitor comparison) lost 7.1% conversion and 13% AOV. On a high-intent campaign landing page, the visitor has already been persuaded by the ad or email that brought them there — what they need is less to get past, not more to read.
2. The whole funnel moved, and that's what makes it credible. A +42.8% CVR lift alone could be a checkout artefact. But CTR rose 18.4% and ATC rate rose 17.0%, both significant. When a change lifts the top, middle and bottom of the funnel together, the mechanism is clear: people were leaving because of the price, and without it they engaged.
3. The AOV trade-off was real and I took it deliberately. AOV fell 5.8%. I flagged AOV as a guardrail before the test precisely because removing price visibility could suppress basket value — and it did, mildly. RPV rose 35.6% anyway. The discipline is in stating the trade-off rather than presenting the conversion number alone.
4. Small-sample directional losses still earn a decision. The SO vs Cotton test ran on ~1.8k visitors and never reached significance. I still recommended against rollout — because the direction was consistent across conversion, AOV and RPV, with no segment where the variant clearly won. Consistency across independent metrics is evidence even when the sample is thin.
5. Owning the build shortens the loop. I built these pages. That meant the hypothesis could go from observation to live test without a design handoff or a dev queue — and it meant the "remove the price" idea was actually executable, because I understood what the page was doing and why the price was where it was.
| Test | Intervention | Visitors | CVR | AOV | Revenue change | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sticker Shock | Removed price | ~7.6k | +42.8% (>99.99% confidence) | −5.8% | +28.6% | Shipped |
| SO vs Cotton v2 | Added competitor comparison | ~1.8k | −7.1% | −13.0% | −17.1% | Rejected |
In plain terms: removing the price from above the fold on a campaign landing page produced a +42.8% conversion rate and +35.6% RPV lift at >99.99% confidence — the largest effect in the CRO programme — generating 28.6% more revenue from slightly fewer visitors, at a cost of 5.8% on AOV that was comfortably outweighed. The paired test showed that adding competitor-comparison content to the same class of page lost on conversion, AOV and RPV.
Together they established a principle I now apply to every campaign page: on a high-intent landing page, the job is to remove obstacles, not to add argument.
Sources: the Step One experiment log and Shoplift test exports. Revenue, traffic and baseline figures have been generalised; relative changes and test statistics are as measured. Programme IDs: AU_CLP_CVR_260214 · AU_CLP_CVR_260127. Note: AU_CLP_CVR_260214 carries a moderate traffic-imbalance flag (>95% confidence). A 2.6% visitor imbalance is immaterial to a +42.8% effect at >99.99% confidence. AU_CLP_CVR_260127 has no statistical block in the results sheet; figures are drawn from the narrative report.