Publishing the capacity customers actually get

A 20,000 mAh power bank cannot deliver 20,000 mAh to a phone — conversion losses and voltage step-up take roughly a third of it. The whole category prints the cell number anyway, so shoppers buy expecting five charges, receive three, and write the review accordingly.

The brand's rating had settled at 3.8 with 38% of its negative reviews describing exactly this gap. The team's instinct was to defend: the number was technically accurate, every competitor used the same one, and printing a smaller figure would lose the comparison on the search page. Meanwhile the reviews were doing more damage to conversion than any spec sheet was doing good.

We stopped selling a number the customer would never see.

• Deliverable output stated on the page — the real usable figure, alongside the cell capacity, with the difference explained in one line.
• Charges-per-device framing — how many times it fills the common device sizes, which is the unit the buyer is actually interested in.
• Imagery carrying the honest figure in the second frame, so it is seen before the purchase rather than discovered after it.
• The same figure carried into the Q&A and buyer-message replies, so the answer a shopper is given matches the number the page prints.

The rating climbed from 3.8 to 4.2 and returns fell from 11% to 4%, because the product now does what the page said it would.

Conversion rose 44% despite advertising a smaller number than every competitor — the honest figure reads as confidence, and the review section stopped arguing with the listing. Revenue grew 71%. The one cost was a 3% drop in click-through from the search page, which the conversion gain repaid many times over.