Last month, I went full nerd and did something I’d been wanting to do for years. I used Claude to analyze 900+ PickFu split testing polls (now 991) from 34,000 respondents across the 850+ eCommerce brands we’ve worked with. The result was a database that lets me look up trends, spot patterns, and answer almost any question about a client’s creative before we even start designing. This has reframed how my team and I make every creative decision and I’m sharing all of it here in Design Proof. Twice a week: data-backed creative insights to help you convert better on Amazon and eCommerce.
I’m doing something a little different this week. Instead of me digging through our own data, I’m handing the mic to someone else first.
Max Sigurdson-Scott left a decade of teaching to sell on Amazon full time, then spent a full year posting a new growth hack on LinkedIn every single day. Now he’s living abroad on the beach, like me. And he appropriately named his newsletter “Selling From the Beach”, as he writes from Costa Rica helping Amazon sellers who want the tactical stuff, not the fluff. A few weeks ago he posted something that stopped me mid-scroll, about a packaging mistake I see constantly and had never actually put words to.
Here’s Max:
Here’s why using ALL CAPS in your images & packaging sucks:
When we read, we don’t go letter by letter. Our brains recognize word shapes. These shapes are made by a mix of tall letters like b and h, short ones like a and e, and letters that drop below the line like g and y.
That’s how reading stays fast. We’re pattern matching.
But when you type in ALL CAPS, every letter becomes the same height. You lose the shape. You flatten the word into a block. Every word becomes a rectangle. No visual contrast. No cues for the brain to scan.
(As an aside, I had a science teacher in high school who wrote notes on an overhead projector ALL IN CAPS ALL THE TIME. I guess that’s why it was so hard for me to concentrate? 😅)
...Anyway... So what happens?
Reading slows down
Understanding drops
Mental effort goes up
And your conversion rate takes a hit.
This isn’t just an aesthetic choice. It’s backed by research. Reading all-caps slows you down by up to 20 percent. It increases fatigue. It reduces comprehension. Especially on mobile, where shoppers are scrolling at speed.
If your key info is buried in a hard-to-read wall of text, no one’s reading it. They’re skipping you.
I just posted three examples of this. Great products. Great ideas. But the text design is killing their click-through rate. If you’re doing this on your own packaging or image overlays, fix it now.
Use sentence case. Use line breaks. Make it scannable.
Max’s point isn’t a style preference, it’s a readability mechanism, so it’s testable.
Have a design with all-caps callouts? Mock up a sentence-case version with the same words. If it’s a headline or callout on a main image or A+ module, that’s a clean PickFu pre-test. If it’s in your title or bullets, that’s an Amazon Manage Your Experiments test.
That got me curious enough to go check our own numbers on readability. Here’s what we actually found:
Max’s mechanism is real. Word shape is genuinely one of the ways your brain decides how fast something is to read. I should also add that I’m not against using ALL CAPS in design. In fact, we use caps quite a bit, mostly for headlines or where emphasis is needed. But it’s one input into something bigger, and we’ve tested main images, product images and A+ content enough times now to know readability isn’t one trick.
It’s actually five things stacking on top of each other, and most brands are only doing one of them…
Upgrading to paid is like getting the version of my brain that isn’t filtered for a general audience. Less than one Starbucks order per month, and you get the strategy I charge clients real money for — broken down so you can use it yourself.
Below the paywall:
The five things that actually drive packaging readability in our own testing (with the real effect sizes behind each)
The one place bigger text alone won’t save you
A pro tip for testing this on your own listing.
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