Do body copy A/B tests work in E-commerce?

E-commerce suits this change better than most industries do. Body copy tests win 14% there against 11% across all industries. Within E-commerce that is roughly par — the industry as a whole runs at 14% — so it is a good place for body copy rather than the best thing to test here.

The strongest change type we can measure in E-commerce is CTA copy at 17% on 50+ tests.

The numbers

	E-commerce	all industries
Tests analysed	100+	250+
Beat control	14%	11%
No measurable difference	76%	—
Lost to control	10%	—
Median lift when it won	+8.6%	—

Median traffic per variant was 4222 visitors. Most ran on product pages (59), homepages (38), carts (8).

Every change type we can measure in E-commerce

change type	win rate in E-commerce	tests
CTA copy	17%	50+
Layout	16%	100+
Styling	16%	500+
Hero image	15%	50+
Body copy (this page)	14%	100+
Price framing	12%	50+
Split URL	11%	250+
Headline	8%	100+
Social proof	8%	50+

The industry overview is at E-commerce benchmarks; rates across all industries are on the body copy benchmark.

What counts as a body copy test

Supporting paragraph text is rewritten, shortened or expanded. Headings, images and CTAs are untouched.

Control and variant wireframe for a body copy A/B test — Control on the left, variant on the right. Only the changed element is highlighted.

Body copy tests that won in E-commerce

Truncates each product box title to only its first word, and hides price/buy button elements while resizing product boxes
bullet list of ergonomic benefits followed by a today-only free tire repair kit offer stated twice with slightly different wording
Hides the first nav menu item and renames the second nav item to NEW
three-point bullet list of product benefits: relieves spine/back, cutout relieves perineal area, pain-free cycling

Body copy tests that did not

Changes popup message text and link wording, and darkens the link background color
Detailed product description for a limited-time free-shipping dual chicken thigh gift set, listing brandy- and Shaoxing-marinated chicken thigh varieties with ingredient sourcing, plus bullet points on convenience, no preservatives, dual certification, taste, nutritionist endorsement, and shipping s
Changes popup text to a question and renames the link to a basket-email action, plus recolors the link background

These are individual tests, not rules. Each ran on one site, with one audience, against one page we are not showing you. They are picked to be illustrative rather than sampled at random, and a change that won here can lose on your page for reasons none of this captures. Read them as prompts for what to test, not as findings to copy.

Who ran these tests

This is every Mida account that ran a readable test — in-house marketers, founders, product teams, and agencies working on client sites. Nothing here is filtered by who ran the experiment or how experienced they are.

Low win rates are normal in experimentation, including at the top end. Microsoft's experimentation team, reporting on its own platform, found that only about one third of ideas improve the metric they were designed to improve — and that roughly another third actively hurt it. That is a dedicated experimentation organisation with research, prioritisation and review behind every test.

A mixed population like this one runs below that. The gap is roughly what disciplined practice buys you: ideas grounded in research rather than opinion, one variable at a time, and tests built so the result can actually be read.

So treat these as a general base rate, not a target. If you would rather not close that gap the slow way, find a CRO agency in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands or Australia — or browse every region.

A win is a variant that beat its control on that test's primary goal with a statistically significant result. Tests that never got enough traffic to say anything either way are excluded. The methodology has the full detail, including what these numbers cannot tell you.