Do layout A/B tests work in E-commerce?

In line with both baselines. Layout tests win 16% in E-commerce, against 19% for layout tests generally and 14% for E-commerce generally. Neither the category nor the vertical is moving this much.

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	16%	19%
No measurable difference	67%	—
Lost to control	17%	—
Median lift when it won	+14.3%	—

Median traffic per variant was 4668 visitors. Most ran on homepages (58), product pages (55), category pages (27).

Every change type we can measure in E-commerce

change type	win rate in E-commerce	tests
CTA copy	17%	50+
Layout (this page)	16%	100+
Styling	16%	500+
Hero image	15%	50+
Body copy	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 layout benchmark.

What counts as a layout test

Blocks move, reorder or change position. No copy is rewritten and no new content is added. If you moved a section *and* rewrote it, that is two variables and the result will not tell you which one worked.

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

Layout tests that won in E-commerce

hides the existing carousel and replaces it with a new grid of product/promo cards (award banner, stairlift categories) with images, titles, and CTA buttons
Injects a new horizontal scrollable subnav with category filter links above the product scroll wrapper
Moves the account menu CTA from its original menu position to the last item of the user-menu list
Moves the best-seller section before another section, reordering page content with added border, padding, and spacing styling

Layout tests that did not

Injects a new sticky header with logo, nav links, and mobile burger menu, and hides the existing collections selector element
Adds a new sticky mobile bottom bar on product pages with a variant selector, price display, and an add-to-cart button that mirrors the native action
Moves the color swatch picker to the top of the product details container and restyles spacing/alignment

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.