Clever Tactics That Boost Conversions (and Why)

How should catalogs look?

Try wrapping each item in a border or background. This style nearly doubled conversion rates in ecommerce catalogs (e.g., beverages, resorts; Jia et al., 2024).

Based on eye tracking, customers saw more unique features in these catalogs because they viewed features within products instead of viewing a single feature across products:

Naturally, they saw more varied features.

But it also happened in retail settings: A restaurant doubled their drink sales when their signage wrapped each drink with a border (Jia et al., 2024).

Just be careful when comparisons are critical.

Pricing tiers are often evaluated with back-and-forth comparisons, yet rigid borders can hinder this motion by trapping eye gazes:

In these scenarios, discriminate each item with a solid background without any exterior fencing.

Stronger For

• Small Catalogs. Large catalogs were unaffected by discreteness because they already possessed variety (Jia et al., 2024).
• Contamination Worries. Visual borders feel like tangible borders that can protect food or luxury items from external touches. In one study, natural disasters seemed less likely to travel into adjacent regions when viewed on a map with darker borders (Mishra & Mishra, 2010).
• Curved Backgrounds. Round corners converted better than sharp corners, presumably because round objects feel more touchable (Biswas et al., 2024).

• Biswas, D., Abell, A., & Chacko, R. (2024). Curvy digital marketing designs: virtual elements with rounded shapes enhance online click-through rates. Journal of Consumer Research, 51(3), 552-570.
• Jia, Y., Ouyang, J., Dong, J. Q., & Jiang, Y. (2024). EXPRESS: Framing of Differences: Visual Product Frames Reduce Consumer Choice Deferrals. Journal of Marketing, 00222429241280224.
• Mishra, A., & Mishra, H. (2010). Border bias: The belief that state borders can protect against disasters. Psychological science, 21(11), 1582-1586.

How is your product made?

Try describing your enjoyment with this process (Paley et al., 2024).

Describing enjoyment:

• Boosted a Facebook ad CTR by 40%
• Enhanced perceived quality
• Increased willingness to pay

And this strategy is underused — e.g., only 0.1% of Etsy sellers and 4% of Upwork freelancers mention their enjoyment in creating products or services (Paley et al., 2024).

Why It Works

• Higher Quality. Enjoyment implies motivation and lack of automation.
• Less Reactance. Direct claims trigger suspicion: We help small businesses. Readers will question the previous statement, as if this agency doesn't help small businesses. Indirect claims can distract readers from questioning the core assertion: We enjoy helping small businesses. Now readers will question this enjoyment instead of the main benefit of providing help.

How to Apply

• Describe Products As Complex Yet Enjoyable. A bartender earned more money when they enjoyed making a complex cocktail, but not a simple cocktail (Paley et al., 2024).
• Charge Higher Prices. Researchers confirmed that Upwork freelancers charge lower prices when they enjoy their service, yet buyers are willing to pay higher prices for them (Paley et al., 2024).

Think of your product.

Perhaps it could be described as:

• Sharp
• Unique
• Precise

Well, those descriptions can also apply to digits. Strive for congruence when possible: Adjectives that describe your product should also describe your price.

Why It Works

• Congruence. Buying tickets to a concert? Since you want an emotional experience, you prefer discounts that are emotional (e.g., chance to win free tickets) because of this congruence (Chandon et al., 2000). Digits are merely a different medium to reach this alignment.
• Scaffolding of the Mind. All abstract ideas are built from primitive ideas that we learned early in life — e.g., spatial distance helped us learn numerical distance. These primitive ideas can add neural connections between two seemingly different domains (e.g., products and digits).

How to Apply

• Charge Round Prices For Round Products. In a pilot study, I alternated $9.37 and $10 for a knife and hammer. Participants significantly preferred $10 for hammer even though $9.37 was cheaper.
• Charge Round Prices for Networking Events. Customers who want social connectivity will prefer numerical connectivity (e.g., $50 is connected to many numbers). For example, participants were asked to rate the loneliness of each number from 1 to 100, and they attributed more loneliness to prime numbers that couldn't be divided. Same with prices: While comparing $19 and $21, lonely participants were less deterred by $21 because of its connections to 3 and 7 (Yan & Sengupta, 2021).

• Vary Your Digits to Convey Variety. Product variety seems higher when customers are exposed to more visual diversity (e.g., random shapes, types of people in ads; Khan et al., 2024). And I confirmed this effect in a pilot study: Repeating digits in a price reduced the perceived variety in a box of chocolates because people expected more repetition in the box.
• Charge Precise Prices For Analytical Tools. Customers preferred a calculator with a precise price of $39.72 or $40.29 (vs. $40; Wadhwa & Zhang, 2015). Though one study failed to replicate this effect (Harms et al., 2018). And I couldn't replicate a similar approach. I asked respondents to rate the accuracy of a kitchen scale, and I altered the precision of the price ($18, $19.73, $20, $21.73). But these varying levels of precision didn't influence the perceived accuracy of the scale.
• Charge Paired Digits For Paired Products. Would $7.88 convert better for a pair of socks? Similar effects happen with colors: Lonely customers prefer two colors that look similar because this visual companionship feels like social companionship (Kwon et al., 2024). Or maybe 88 can "feel right" for socks because the visual roundness of 8 resembles the shape of a sock. Perhaps 7 or 9 could deter customers because each digit has a visually sharp endpoint at the bottom.
• Charge Lucky Digits For Lucky Products. Prices in Singapore convert better with 8 because it's a lucky number (Westjohn et al., 2017). Perhaps this idea can explain why Western marketers love 7-ending prices. Or perhaps 7-ending prices convert better for products that require luck (e.g., lottery tickets, mystery boxes, trading cards).

Caveats

• More Research is Needed. This fundamental idea is widely supported, but the individual pricing applications need more empirical validation. I've been conducting a few pilot studies to test some of these effects, and I'll update this tactic with any successes or failures.
• Semantics vs. Visuals. Respondents preferred $10 for a hammer, but I'm not sure if this preference was due to shared roundness in the semantic idea or visual roundness of 0.

• Chandon, P., Wansink, B., & Laurent, G. (2000). A benefit congruency framework of sales promotion effectiveness. Journal of marketing, 64(4), 65-81.
• Khan, U., Kim, S., Choi, S., & Labroo, A. (2024). Diversity Representations in Advertising: Enhancing Variety Perceptions and Brand Outcomes. Journal of Consumer Research, ucae060.
• Kwon, M., Jeon, E., & Han, Y. (2024). The social side of color: How social exclusion influences preferences for color combination. Psychology & Marketing.
• Schumacher, A., Goukens, C., Geyskens, K., & Nielsen, J. H. (2024). Revisiting surprise appeals: How surprise labeling curtails consumption. Journal of Consumer Psychology.
• Wadhwa, M., & Zhang, K. (2015). This number just feels right: The impact of roundedness of price numbers on product evaluations. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(5), 1172-1185.
• Wang, Y., Jiang, J., & Yang, Y. (2023). Magic odd numbers: The effect of numerical parity on variety-seeking. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 73, 103345.
• Westjohn, S. A., Roschk, H., & Magnusson, P. (2017). Eastern versus western culture pricing strategy: Superstition, lucky numbers, and localization. Journal of International Marketing, 25(1), 72-90.
• Yan, D., & Sengupta, J. (2021). The effects of numerical divisibility on loneliness perceptions and consumer preferences. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(5), 755-771.

Should prices end with 99 or 95?

It depends on the base price. Customers preferred:

• $3.99 and $6.99 for cheap items (e.g., cheese)
• $49.95 for expensive items (e.g., kettle)

(Gendall, 1998; Schindler, 2006).

Researchers are unsure why this happens, but I have a hunch. The size of the price doesn't matter. What matters is the expected price.

I confirmed this effect in a pilot study.

I asked people to imagine buying flip flops, and I adjusted the expected and final price. The interaction was significant:

• $18.99 was preferred when expecting $25
• $18.95 was preferred when expecting $12

Why It Works

Suppose that you expect to pay $12 for flip flops.

Then you see $18.95. How does it feel?

Well, you evaluate this price by starting at $12, then traveling upward. Even though $18.95 is higher than you expected, it stopped early. It could be higher.

But $18.99 is pushed to the highest threshold in this bracket. So it feels more painful.

Conversely, an expected price of $25 will result in downward motion. Now $18.99 feels good because it pushed through a numerical boundary, while $18.95 feels like it has wiggle room to move even lower.

For simplicity:

• End in 99 for low prices
• End in 95 for high prices

But ultimately, the choice between 99 vs. 95 depends on the expected price and whether customers are traveling upward or downward to reach your actual price.

7-Ending Prices?

I always get asked about 7-endings (e.g., $97, $29.97).

Some marketers swear by them, but I haven't seen any concrete data that shows they're effective. If anything, 7-endings might be less effective because 7 is the only digit with more than one syllable (see Coulter et al., 2012).

For now, my rule of thumb: Since a 7-ending is slightly more unusual, it will push more attention on the price. So if your price is a good deal, a 7-ending could be persuasive. But if your price is considered expensive, choose 95 to avoid pushing more attention on the price than necessary.

• Coulter, K. S., Choi, P., & Monroe, K. B. (2012). Comma N'cents in pricing: The effects of auditory representation encoding on price magnitude perceptions. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 395-407.
• Gendall, P. (1998). Estimating the effect of odd pricing. Journal of Product & Brand Management, 7(5), 421-432.
• Schindler, R. M. (2006). The 99 price ending as a signal of a low-price appeal. Journal of Retailing, 82(1), 71-77.

What is your product benefit?

Some products create an increase or decrease:

• Skin creams reduce wrinkles
• Shampoos increase silkiness
• Air fresheners remove odors

And you might depict a separate change:

• Increase in skin cells
• Increase in blood flow
• Reduction of hormones

Both directions should be consistent even if they're unrelated (Bharti & Sussman, 2024).

Customers preferred:

• An energy supplement that increased a hormone
• A sleep supplement that decreased a hormone

Why It Works

• Processing Fluency. Something feels right, and we blame the product.

How to Apply

• Tweak Your Explanation. Does your cream reduce wrinkles? Describe the reduction of collagen, rather than the increasing turnover of skin cells (Bharti & Sussman, 2024).
• Tweak Your Branding. Does your supplement reduce anxiety by increasing chemicals? Fix these inconsistent directions; perhaps it should increase calmness instead.
• Describe an Increase When Possible. Explanations with an increase often converted better. Similar effects occur with size: Bigger seems better, even if size is irrelevant to actual benefits (Silvera et al., 2002).
• Borrow the Right Metaphors. Citizens preferred different solutions for crime depending on a surrounding metaphor: They preferred social reforms and treatments for a crime virus, yet they preferred attacking the problem with harsh enforcements when it was a crime beast (Thibodeau, 2016).

Related Applications

• Align Directionality of Discounts. Which is better: save 30% or get 30% off? It depends on the directionality of the purchase: Discounts should reduce losses for prevention needs (e.g., save 30% on a first aid kit), but increase gains for acquisition needs (e.g., extra 30% off for bulk purchases; Ramanathan & Dhar, 2010).

• Bharti, S., & Sussman, A. B. (2024). Consumers Prefer Products That Work Using Directionally Consistent Causal Chains. Journal of Consumer Research, ucae066.
• Ramanathan, S., & Dhar, S. K. (2010). The effect of sales promotions on the size and composition of the shopping basket: Regulatory compatibility from framing and temporal restrictions. Journal of Marketing Research, 47(3), 542-552.
• Silvera, D. H., Josephs, R. A., & Giesler, R. B. (2002). Bigger is better: The influence of physical size on aesthetic preference judgments. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 15(3), 189-202.
• Thibodeau, P. H. (2016). Extended metaphors are the home runs of persuasion: Don’t fumble the phrase. Metaphor and Symbol, 31(2), 53-72.