Case Study: Leading National Pet Retailer achieves over 100% add-to-cart lift and 15% conversion increase with SiteSpect

A/B Testing Product Images Dog Models Against Model Dogs

A leading national pet retailer with 1,500 stores across the U.S. and Canada and a major e-commerce business tested a small creative change on product pages for dog clothing. The marketing team hypothesized that replacing photos of real dogs with plain white stuffed-dog models would be cheaper to produce and wouldn’t hurt sales, so they set up an A/B test to validate the idea.

The test swapped product images—same apparel shown on actual dogs versus on plain white doll dogs—while keeping pages otherwise identical. The doll images drove a >100% lift in add-to-carts and a 15% increase in conversion, likely because neutral models made it easier for shoppers to imagine the clothing on their own pets rather than associating items with a specific breed.