The 20% Rule: A Simple Formula for Pricing an Order Bump So It Feels Like a No-Brainer

Most creators price their order bump the same way they price everything else: they guess, feel a little awkward about it, and move on. Too low and the offer reads as an afterthought nobody bothers reading. Too high and you've turned a three-second checkbox into a second buying decision, complete with hesitation and a customer who abandons the whole cart to go think about it. The fix isn't a better guess. It's a formula — a fixed ratio between your main offer's price and your bump's price that keeps it feeling like free money instead of a new purchase to evaluate.

Why a ratio beats a flat price

The instinct most people follow is to pick a bump price that feels reasonable in isolation — $7 sounds cheap, $15 sounds fine, done. But nobody evaluates your order bump in isolation. They evaluate it in the two seconds after they've decided to buy your main offer, with that number still fresh in their head. A $15 bump next to a $19 ebook basically doubles their bill. The same $15 bump next to a $97 course barely registers. The price that works is never fixed — it's a fraction of whatever they just agreed to pay. That's the premise of the 20% rule: price the bump as a percentage of the main offer, not as a standalone product.

This matters more than it sounds like it should, because order bumps live or die on checkout speed. The whole point of putting one on your store.fan checkout page is that it converts on impulse — someone who already has their card out, already trusts you enough to pay, and just needs one more tiny 'yes.' The instant the bump requires real deliberation, you've lost the mechanism that made it worth adding in the first place.

The formula

Take your main offer's price and multiply it by 0.15 to 0.25. That range is your order bump's sweet spot. A $40 main offer should carry a bump priced somewhere between $6 and $10. A $150 cohort-style course should carry a bump between $22 and $37. It's not a rigid science — round to a number that looks clean on a receipt — but staying inside that band is what keeps the bump feeling proportionate rather than like a second sale.

What actually belongs in the bump slot

The formula only works if the thing you're pricing is genuinely bump-shaped. A second full course crammed into a 20%-of-price box will underprice a real product and confuse buyers about what they're getting. Order bumps work best as small, complete, instantly-understandable add-ons: a bonus template, a cheat-sheet version of the main content, a printable checklist, an extra swipe file, one extra 15-minute recorded walkthrough. The description should be readable in the time it takes to glance at a checkbox — if it needs a paragraph to explain, it's a separate product that deserves its own page, not a bump.

Anchor the ratio visibly, don't just apply it quietly

Pricing correctly is half the job — the other half is making the ratio obvious without spelling out the math. "Add the Notion tracker for just $7" sitting directly under a $39 checkout total does the anchoring work automatically; the buyer's brain does the comparison whether you point it out or not. What kills conversion is separating the two numbers, or wording the bump so generically ('add extra bonus') that it doesn't feel tied to the specific thing they're about to buy. Keep it on the same screen, in the same currency format, visually smaller than the main price, and worded as a direct extension of the product they already chose.

An order bump doesn't need to be convincing. It needs to be small enough that saying yes requires no convincing at all.— store.fan team

Where this shows up in a real store

Picture a $59 Lightroom preset pack. At the 20% mark, a bump priced around $9-12 — say, a matching set of Instagram Reel cover templates — reads as an obvious add-on. Bump it up to $25 and the buyer starts comparing it against buying the preset pack alone somewhere cheaper. Drop it to $2 and half your customers won't notice it's there. Check out a live example store to see how a clean checkout with a well-scaled add-on actually looks in practice.

This also matters when running a sitewide discount on the main offer: decide whether your bump price scales down with it or stays fixed. Scaling it down keeps the ratio intact; leaving it fixed can accidentally push the bump above the 30% ceiling and quietly tank its conversion for the whole promotion.

Test the ratio, not the number

If you're already running order bumps and results feel inconsistent across products, check whether you've reused one flat bump price across offers at different price points. A $9 bump that crushed it on your $45 ebook will likely underperform on your $199 program — not because $9 is a bad price, but because it's fallen below the 15% floor and stopped feeling connected to that purchase. Re-anchor it to roughly 20% of that offer's price instead, and you're finally testing a variable that explains the swing.

1. 1List every product where you currently offer a bump, next to its main price
2. 2Calculate what percentage of the main price your current bump sits at
3. 3Flag anything under 15% or over 25% for a reprice
4. 4Adjust bump prices to land inside the band, rounding to a clean number
5. 5Track bump attach rate for two weeks after the change before drawing conclusions

None of this matters if there's no checkout for the bump to sit on. The formula is a five-minute fix once your store is live — the real unlock is having one shareable link where this pricing logic can actually run, instead of scattered payment links or DMs. Check the blog for more guides on tightening the rest of your checkout once the bump itself is dialed in.