Labels on product thumbnails: which to use, how many and without misleading

In a category listing the customer compares dozens of thumbnails in a few seconds. Photo, name, price. A small label in the corner (“New”, “Offer”, “24 h delivery”) can be the piece of information that makes them stop at a product. Or it can be noise, if every thumbnail carries three coloured labels and none stands out.

Labels work when they are few, true and relevant to the decision. Let’s see how to achieve that.

Which labels help people choose

The “out of stock” label is the most often forgotten and one of the most useful: it saves the customer from opening the product page only to find they cannot buy.

How many at once

A practical rule: one label per thumbnail, two at most, and not on every thumbnail. If 80% of the listing carries “Offer”, the label stops meaning anything. Set a priority for when a product meets several conditions: for example, “Out of stock” beats everything, then “Offer”, then “New”.

Mind the position too. Labels cover part of the photo; place them in a corner that does not hide the product, and in the same spot for the same type of label across the whole catalogue, so the eye learns where to look. On mobile, with small thumbnails, check they do not take up half the image.

Keeping labels honest

The problem with labels added by hand is that they stay. The “New” from a year ago, the “Offer” from a campaign that has ended, “Last units” on a product you receive a hundred of every week. They do not just damage credibility: some can be misleading commercial practices.

The solution is for labels to depend on rules, not on someone remembering to remove them:

• New: products added in the last N days, removed automatically once the period is over.
• Offer: only if the product has a specific price or an active reduction.
• Best seller: based on sales over a recent period.
• Stock: based on available units, above or below a threshold.
• Campaign: with a start and end date.

“Last units” and false urgency

Scarcity labels work because they create urgency, and that is precisely why they are abused. If you show “2 left” when you have two hundred in the warehouse, or put “Last units” on a product you restock every week, you are misleading the customer. Besides being bad practice, European consumer authorities are paying increasing attention to so-called dark patterns, false scarcity and false urgency among them.

If you use this type of label, base it on real stock and on a threshold that makes sense for that product.

Labels by customer group

In stores that sell to both consumers and trade customers, the same label does not work for everyone. A “Trade price” or “Available by the pallet” label only makes sense for the identified B2B customer; showing it to a consumer is confusing. The same goes for offers exclusive to a group: the label should show what the price shows.

Design: consistent and legible

• One style per type of label, in your brand colours and with enough contrast against the photo.
• Short text: one or two words, or a figure.
• Animations, in moderation: a label flashing on every thumbnail is uncomfortable and can bother people sensitive to motion.
• Translated into each of the store’s languages.
• Lightweight formats (optimised PNG or WebP, or text with CSS), so as not to add weight to listings with many thumbnails.

How to tell if they work

Compare the click-through rate from the listing for products with a label against similar products without one, or the same product before and after. If a label changes nothing, it is surplus: free up the thumbnail for the ones that do work.

Also look at the effect on the rest of the listing. A very eye-catching offer label can divert clicks towards low-margin products; a “fast delivery” label can reduce “when will it arrive?” enquiries and cancellations over lead times. Labels are a tool for steering, and it is worth deciding where you want to steer before adding them.

And, as always, test changes on a copy of the store before taking them to production, especially if your theme is old or your PrestaShop is not up to date: many incompatibilities with label modules come from listing templates modified by hand years ago.

How to solve it in PrestaShop

EasyProduct Labels places labels and stickers on product images according to rules you define once: new arrivals, on offer, best sellers, out of stock, or with more or fewer units than you set, filtering by category, brand, supplier, price, features or product condition, by customer group and with start and end dates. When a product no longer meets the condition, the label changes automatically. It includes an editor to design stickers from the back office and export them as transparent PNG, WebP or SVG, nine positions on the image, optional animations and multilingual text, and you choose whether they appear in listings, on the product page or both.