Less social sharing buttons on ecommerce product pages mean higher conversions

I'd encourage everybody to actually test this on their site before assuming that no social sharing buttons will jump your conversion rate.

Part of the problem with having them on product pages is a lot of the times people aren't too eager to "Like" or share a product page...especially something like snow blowers or heavy equipment.

I've seen sites that sell products that _do_ earn a lot of social traction on product pages that like increase the conversion rate (the one I'm thinking of sells wall art/decals).

The reduction in conversions might be offset by the increase in traffic though.

For example, you get:

Without sharing buttons: 100 visitors and 50% conversion = 50 sales. Total: 50 sales.

With sharing buttons: 100 visitors and 40% conversion = 40 sales. +50 referrals from shares, 40% conversion = 20 additional sales. Total: 60 sales.

Clearly, having sharing buttons would be better if users sharing drives a lot of additional traffic. You can't just look at a single metric (conversions) and ignore everything else.