6 Reasons Why Product Badges Are Important for Your eCommerce

Just a few weeks ago, we released the new version of our YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews plugin and published an article on how to remind customers to leave reviews. 

But there are so many plugins that are still a work in progress. After months of hard work, it’s time to put another one in the spotlight: today we’ll be talking about YITH WooCommerce Badge Management, the ultimate solution for managing badges of any kind in your shop. A plugin that has had more than a dozen updates and improvements over the past year.

What are badges and what are they for?

Badges are text or graphic labels that you can use to highlight the latest news in your shop, your best-selling products, active discounts or promotions, and positive policies for your customers (like free shipping, purchase guarantees, returns, refunds, etc.). 

An effective badge catches the user’s eye right away and can make a big impact on sales and conversions. It’s a great, versatile marketing tool that any shop can use to its advantage. 

Take the industry leader Amazon, for example. They use all kinds of badges on the products that are being sold there, from the usual “Best Seller” to other special ones. 

According to Momentum Commerce, badges related to environmental stewardship on Amazon can boost sales by 8.4%, while those related to small businesses can increase sales by as much as 13.5%.  

It’s clear that these visual solutions have a great potential to influence customers’ choices. 

With YITH WooCommerce Badge Management you will have a powerful builder at your disposal through which you can create and customize any kind of badge: from the simple round badge with the percentage discount on multiple products to advanced labels that point out their features (like the “Sugar-free”, “Hypoallergenic”, “Gluten-free”, “Vegan” badges and similar); from themed badges used to emphasize Black Friday or Christmas discounts to the popular brands badges to let your customers quickly spot products by specific brands.

While these are useful in every type of store, there are some market segments where they are essential. Take food, for example, with the growing focus on vegan, organic, and gluten-free products. Or clothing, with a focus on cruelty-free or natural fibers. Or even the world of cosmetics, where customers have similar concerns. 

Let’s discover, then, 6 key ways you can use badges to improve your store’s user experience and sell more.

1- Use badges to draw your users’ attention to on-sale products

This is a common pattern in all the big eCommerce stores and therefore easily acknowledged by online buyers: discounted products that are worth checking are those with a discount badge.

With our plugin, you can create dynamic badges that automatically show the product discount percentage and with “advanced badges” you can also show the actual saving amount to your customers.

2- Use a badge to highlight new arrivals 

Another badge that easily catches the customer’s attention is the one that highlights “new arrivals”, that is the new products added to your catalog. Particularly if you have loyal customers that visit your shop on a regular basis, pointing out new products is a smart way to add a dynamic touch to your shop and to keep the interest of your shop visitors always high.

This type of badge makes any new product in the catalog immediately noticeable, catching the attention of even the most loyal customers and allowing you to communicate the continuous update of the products you sell. 

3- Use a badge to leverage the scarcity and urgency principles

Do you have products with low stock values and do you want to show this to your customers to leverage the scarcity principle? Create a badge to inform your customers that only one item of that specific bag is available, and your customers’ interest will skyrocket. 

It’s the same model that Booking.com (among others) has successfully been using for years: when you are checking a room’s price, the platform notifies you that you are viewing the last available room — it’s not properly ethical, but it works.

You can also use badges to promote discounts and promotions and trigger a sense of urgency: you just have to create two badges, one to highlight a 50% off the product, and another one below that states “Only for today”.

With our plugin, you can indeed create and assign more than one badge to the same product and set the exact position for each of them. 

The scarcity principle has two main paths: a low stock of items or a short time to get an offer and these are among the most powerful strategies in the world. It’s not for nothing that time-based promotions have always existed and are still being used.

4- Use badges to visually promote discounts and themed offers 

A promotion will only work if people know about it. Offering the most random discounts can be a waste of time if your customers don’t even notice them.  

Are you thinking about offering a 10% discount on all your products? Go ahead and create a graphical badge and customize its style and color to display this promotion in the best possible way. If you want to save time, you can use one of the badges included in our badge library. We have designed lots of them, and they cover the most popular strategies: 3 for 2, 2 for 1, BOGO, Christmas and Valentine’s Day discounts, end-of-season sales, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Halloween, etc.

If you create promotions and discounts with our awesome YITH WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing and Discounts plugin, you will also be able to fully take advantage of the integration between these two plugins and quickly assign a badge based on the discount rules you have created. For example, with just a few clicks, you can assign a “Black Friday” badge only to those products that have that specific discount applied.

5- Use badges to point out key features, characteristics, and strengths of the products you sell

Even if the badges are primarily used to visually promote discounts and offers, the use cases are almost unlimited. You can use badges to spotlight products of specific categories or products with specific features that are worth highlighting. 

If you have a clothing store, you can take Zalando and ASOS as an example and use the badges to highlight “Plus size” or “Maternity” items, as well as “Tall” or “Petite” for specific lines of products.

If you have a food eCommerce store, you could take advantage of badges to quickly spot the “Vegan”, “Sugar-Free”, or “Gluten-free” products. If you sell natural cosmetics, you can upload custom images and create image badges to use widely acknowledged symbols like the cruelty-free one.

A wide range of users browses your product catalog without even opening the product detail page. Knowing that, using badges to highlight those one or two strengths products have can turn out to be a very powerful strategy to encourage users to check them out more carefully. 

Don’t forget you only have a few seconds to grab your customers’ attention, approximately between 40 seconds and a minute and a half. A badge has a more immediate effect than the same information written in the product description (which is only read if the customer visits the product page).

6- Use badges to identify and highlight products of specific brands

If you sell products by popular brands or that are particularly recognizable (and trusted) by your customers, you can create badges that will make them stand out in your eCommerce store.  
For example, the website Next adds a badge with the Adidas logo on the top right corner of all Adidas products: 

Even in the case you sell products by exclusive stylists or designers, you can use badges to make your customers’ journey easier, as they do on SHEIN with the most popular product lines like the “Emery Rose” designs:

Well, you can certainly add the logo manually on every single image of the product with any photo editor, that’s true, but it would certainly be time-consuming and quite tedious. Moreover, if one day you decide to replace this logo, you should manually edit every single image once again.  

So, to recap: badges can help you promote products and offers and can substantially improve the customer experience on your website. 

Handling badges using a tool like YITH WooCommerce Badge Management allows you to simplify the badge creation step (thanks to the integrated badge builder, which includes a preview to monitor the final appearance of the badge in real-time) and to create custom rules to define on which products and for how long the badge will be displayed.

Conclusion

It’s good to keep in mind that what you see in your store might be different from what your customers see. As they get to know your products, the most important details might not stand out as much, but that’s where you need to make sure they’re visually highlighted. 

Give YITH WooCommerce Badge Management a try and bring your store to life with some eye-catching badges!