The flash sale model is based on urgency such as limited stock, time-sensitive deals, and exclusive access. While flash sites include countdown timers, many fail to highlight social proof behavioural data on product pages such as how many people have bought or are looking at an item.
This gap between time sensitive information and real-time browser data can mean the difference between bounce or buy for hesitant shoppers. It is exactly what BrandAlley discovered when they implemented Taggstar’s social proof messaging with results that speak for themselves.
The Flash Sale Challenge
BrandAlley’s model is compelling – 10 new flash sales daily, designer names, discounts of up to 80%, and more than nine million unique visitors a month. That is a large volume of customers moving through a site where the product catalogue is always changing.
With a constantly rotating product offering, the challenge becomes how to help customers make confident decisions quickly. Flash sale shoppers typically ask questions such as: Is this actually a good deal? Is anyone else buying this? Will this sell out?
Most eCommerce conversion tools such as personalisation engines can’t answer these questions. Social proof messaging, on the other hand, offers one of the most direct ways to answer these questions by surfacing real-time signals about the actions of other shoppers.
Three Weeks from Conversation to Live
For BrandAlley, conversion results were critical, but the ease and speed of implementation also played an important role when deciding to invest in social proof.
From first meeting to live implementation was just under three weeks. That matters because in retail, speed of execution and time to value is critical. A technology solution that takes six months to onboard has a very different ROI profile to one that generates results before the month is out.
BrandAlley ran a proof of concept for 14 days in November 2025, using 13 different social proof message types across the full funnel: messages highlighting how many people had viewed a product in recent hours, how many times an item had sold in the last five days, and which products were trending in real time.
The results across those 14 days: 831 incremental orders, £67,895 in additional revenue, and a 5.91% overall conversion rate uplift across desktop and mobile. Projected to a full year, that’s a 1,417% ROI.
What Comes Next for BrandAlley?
In addition to expanding social proof messaging across the site and testing new message types, BrandAlley is also exploring Taggstar’s Attribute Messaging and Dynamic Badging solutions.
Attribute Messaging takes the same underlying principle of giving shoppers the information they need and applies it to product-specific messaging. Leveraging product information, attribute messaging might highlight that an item is suitable for running or that the fabric is 100% cotton. AI and real-time product data combine to surface relevant attributes and make these messages dynamic and relevant at scale.
Dynamic Badging automates the application of badges across a catalogue to flag new arrivals, low stock, or price drops, without a human having to manually update every product tile every day.
Together with social proof, these represent a broader shift in how forward-thinking retailers are thinking about on-site messaging. It is less about broadcasting deals and more about removing friction at the point of decision. The goal is not to pressure customers into buying, it is to give them enough information to turn hesitation into action.
Read the full BrandAlley case study to see the complete results.
