A buyer opens a category of forty products and decides within seconds which three to open. They do not read the names — they scan the grid and catch on whatever stands out. A badge is the cheapest way into those three: a small «-30%» or «new» in the corner of the image.
Among the marketing tools available to a shop this is about the cheapest: it works with no budget and asks the buyer for nothing. Exactly the same mechanism works against you once there are too many of them. Below: where the line is, and how to avoid removing badges by hand a month after the sale ended.
Why a badge beats a word in the title
Scanning a catalogue is not reading. The eye moves across the grid, stopping at contrasting patches, and only then does the brain read what is next to them. A coloured badge is a contrasting patch by definition, which is why it works at all.
| Way to highlight a product | What the buyer sees while scanning |
|---|---|
| The word «new» in the title | nothing — titles are read after the choice is made |
| A red price | noticeable, but only in comparison with other prices |
| A badge in the image corner | noticeable immediately, before any reading |
The same fact implies the limit worth knowing in advance: when there are many badges, they stop being contrast. Research on banner blindness shows people have learned to ignore elements that look like advertising — and a gaudy catalogue reads exactly like that.
How many badges per card
The practical limit is two or three. In CommerCentr that is not advice in a help page but a setting, defaulting to three: more simply is not rendered, even where a product matches five rules at once.
The limit guards against a familiar scenario: the product is on promotion, it is also new, it is also in a category with its own badge, and it is also from a brand with a badge — and the card turns into a garland in which the product itself is invisible.
The priority is defined too: a manual assignment on the product outranks group rules. If you deliberately put a badge on a specific item, an automatic one will not push it out. The logic is simple — a person's specific decision beats a general rule.
Auto-rules: so nobody places them by hand
Placing badges by hand across a thousand products is impossible, so the real work is done by rules. Four types cover nearly everything a shop needs.
Promotional price. The badge appears by itself as soon as the product has a reduced price, and disappears when that ends. This is the most important of the rules: promotional badges left standing after the promotion are not merely untidy, they are grounds for a complaint.
New arrival. A product counts as new for N days after it is added, and the number of days is configurable. That matters: thirty days is normal for clothing and far too long for electronics or food.
Category and brand. A badge for a whole group of products: own import, local manufacturer, a collection being cleared. Set once on the category, it applies to everything that falls into it afterwards, including products added tomorrow.
What all four share is that they clean up after themselves. The promotion ended, the new-arrival period elapsed, the product moved to another category — the badge is gone with nobody intervening.
What auto-rules cannot do
And here is the real gap, visible the first time you prepare for a sale.
The «promotional price» rule reacts to the fact of a discount, not to a date. But campaigns are planned in advance: «Black Friday, the 28th to the 30th», «spring collection until the end of March». A badge for a campaign like that has to be switched on by hand the evening before and off by hand the morning after.
The second time anyone remembers this is on the Monday, when buyers are still seeing «40% off today only» on full-price products. That is not a cosmetic problem: promising a discount that no longer exists is a direct cause of complaints, and in some jurisdictions a question for the advertising regulator.
A display window: a badge that switches itself off
This is what the Badge Pro extension closes. Two fields appear on the badge form — the start and the end of display. Outside that window the badge is not rendered at all, and there is nothing to switch back.
Empty fields mean «no limit», so standing badges like «own production» work as before — a window is only needed by badges that have an expiry.
One implementation detail worth knowing, because it saves you from a silent mistake: if the dates are entered the wrong way round, with the end before the start, the badge would never show — and the reason would be invisible in the interface. So an inverted window is swapped on save instead of storing the trap.
The second half of the extension is a custom icon. The base set of glyphs is limited, and a shop with its own identity often finds it too narrow. Pro allows uploading your own SVG right on the badge form.
There is a technical caution here worth stating plainly: an SVG is not a picture, it is markup, and markup can carry scripts. It is rendered on every card in the catalogue, so an uploaded file is sanitised — scripts, event handlers and external references are stripped. Otherwise the icon field would be a way to run someone else's code on your storefront.
Colour, size and placement: what is decided before the text
A badge is registered before it is read, so its presentation matters more than its wording.
A colour should mean one thing. Red, already taken by discounts, should not also mark new arrivals: within a few cards the buyer learns your colour language and then relies on it without reading. Two different things in one colour break that language.
Contrast matters more than brightness. A badge sits over a product photograph, and photographs differ: one that looks excellent on a dark background disappears on a light one. A solid backing with short text works more reliably than a translucent layer.
The corner is not an arbitrary choice. Badges conventionally sit in the top corner of the image, and moving them to the centre genuinely raises visibility — at the cost of covering the product. A gain in the first second becomes a loss in the second, when the buyer cannot see what is being sold.
Text is one or two words. Badges are read with peripheral vision: «-30%», «new», «last few». A sentence in a badge is not read at all and works simply as a coloured patch.
Separately on accessibility: colour must not be the only carrier of meaning. If two badges differ only in shade, some buyers will not see the difference — so text is needed even where the colour seems self-evident.
How to use them without devaluing them
A few rules that do not depend on the platform.
One badge, one reason to open the card. If a buyer cannot say in a second what your badge means, it does not count. «Top» and «hit» on neighbouring products are the classic example of badges that mean nothing.
A promotional badge must have an end. Always. Even if the promotion is «open-ended» — there are no open-ended promotions, only forgotten ones.
Do not badge more than a third of the catalogue. If every second product carries one, it stops distinguishing anything and simply adds noise to the grid.
Check on mobile. A card on a phone is three times smaller, and three badges that look neat on a desktop cover half the product image there.
What this does not do
A badge does not make a product more attractive — it only directs attention. Marking an item nobody buys as a «bestseller» raises card views, not sales. Sometimes that is useful as diagnosis: it becomes clear the problem is not visibility but the offer itself.
It also does not control the discount. A «-30%» badge reflects a price, it does not set one: discounts live in pricing and promotions, and the badge merely announces them in the catalogue.
And it does not replace filters. A buyer looking for new arrivals needs a filter, not a visual sweep of the grid. Badges help the person browsing, not the person searching for something specific.
Summary
Badges work while they are few and while they are honest. Technically a shop needs three things: rules that place badges by themselves; a limit that stops a card becoming a garland; and an expiry after which a promotional badge disappears without anyone's reminder.
The first two work for free in CommerCentr. The third — the display window — is in the paid extension along with the custom icon, and it is needed exactly when you start planning promotions ahead rather than switching them on by hand on the day.
A simple self-check: if you left for a week tomorrow, would the catalogue still be honest? If not, what the badges lack is not design but dates.
See also newsletter segmentation — a promotion has to be announced to someone — and GPSR and product data if you sell into the EU.