Product Labels on Shopify: Which Badges Are Worth Showing

One clear label beats a stack of stickers

A collection page is scanned in seconds. A small label in the corner of a product photo, such as New, 20% off or Bestseller, tells a shopper what changed without making them open the product. The moment every card carries one, though, the labels stop meaning anything. Keep them few, keep them short and keep them true.

To plan your own set, the product labels tool for Shopify puts your label rules in order, flags clashes with your theme's badges, and previews the labels as a real store widget.

Labels worth showing

• New. For products added recently, such as in the last 30 days. It goes stale on its own, which is what you want.
• A sale percentage. Only where it is exact. If a product's sizes or colours are discounted differently, a single number overstates some of them, so show the smallest discount or a plain Sale label instead.
• Sold out. Useful when sold-out products stay in your collections, unless your theme already says so.
• A tag you control. Bestseller, Staff pick or Gift idea, applied by tag. These are claims, so apply them only where they are true.

One label per card, in the right order

Two or three labels on one card fight each other. Give each card one, and decide the order: when a product matches more than one rule, the first rule in your list wins. Put the label a shopper most needs first. Sold out usually belongs above New, because a new product that has sold out should say so. A rule that every product on a page matches, such as Sale in a sale collection, tells shoppers nothing there and is better left off that page.

Living with your theme's badges

Most themes already draw their own Sale and Sold out badges. Do not add a second sale label beside the theme's, and put your labels in a different corner so the two never overlap. Use your own labels for what the theme does not show: New, tags, and an exact percentage where the theme only says Sale.

Write labels in one or two plain words, in sentence case, and make sure the text has enough contrast against its background to read at a small size.

Next step

List the labels you want and the order they should win in, then open the product labels tool to check them and preview the Product labels widget from the Nudgesmart app. You set it up in the app and switch it on across your store as an app embed. The other store widgets are in the store widget gallery.

For how labels fit with the other widgets on your store, see which product page widgets earn their place.