Ecommerce Conversion Optimization: Turning More Visitors Into Customers Without Spending More on Ads

#1. Find your leak before you fix anything

Your store already tells you where people drop off.

On Shopify, the Conversion rate breakdown report (Analytics, then Reports, in the Behavior category) shows the funnel: all sessions, sessions with cart additions, sessions that reached checkout, and sessions that completed checkout. Shopify defines conversion rate as “The percentage of sessions that resulted in a purchase,” and calculates each step against your total sessions. If lots of people add to cart but few reach checkout, your problem is the cart. If many reach checkout but few finish, it’s the checkout.

One detail worth knowing: Shopify only counts a session as reaching checkout when there was “user input (for example, a key press or mouse click) during checkout.”

In Google Analytics, the ecommerce events tell the same story: view_item_list, add_to_cart, begin_checkout and purchase, among others. Google’s ecommerce guide describes a typical setup as measuring “viewing item lists or details, adding or removing items from a cart, initiating checkout, making purchases or refunds, and applying promotions.”

To get a conversion rate out of Google Analytics, mark purchase as a key event and look at Session key event rate. Google’s Analytics Help defines it as “The percentage of sessions that converted” and gives the formula: “number of sessions in which a key event happened / total number of sessions.” One catch: it counts any key event, not just purchases. Google’s API reference describes it as the percentage of sessions “in which any key event was triggered,” so if you’ve also marked something like a newsletter signup as a key event, those sessions count too.

#2. Can shoppers find what they want?

Baymard Institute’s ecommerce search research puts it simply: “After all, if users can’t find what they are searching for, they can’t buy it from you.”

#3. The product page

The product page is where the decision happens. Before you redesign one, open your top-selling product on your phone and check four things: can you see the price and the delivery cost without scrolling, are the photos big and clear, is the description yours and not the manufacturer’s, and is there proof (reviews, lab results, a returns promise) near the buy button? I go through each of these step by step in my guide to product page SEO, so I won’t repeat it here.

#4. The cart, with no surprise costs

Baymard Institute’s cart abandonment research puts the average documented cart abandonment rate at 70.22%, based on 50 different studies. Some of that is people who were never going to buy. In Baymard’s study of US online shoppers, 42% had abandoned a cart because they were “just browsing / not ready to buy.”

The rest is mostly fixable. When Baymard set the just-browsing group aside, these were the reasons shoppers gave most often for abandoning:

• Extra costs too high (shipping, tax, fees): 40%
• Delivery was too slow: 20%
• Didn’t trust the site with their credit card information: 19%
• The site wanted them to create an account: 18%
• Too long or complicated checkout process: 17%
• The website had errors or crashed: 17%
• Returns policy wasn’t satisfactory: 13%
• Couldn’t see or calculate the total order cost up front: 12%

The shares add up to well over a hundred percent, so many shoppers gave more than one reason.

The biggest one is also the easiest to fix. Show shipping cost and delivery time before the checkout, ideally in the cart itself, so the total never surprises anyone. If you offer free shipping over a certain amount, say so in the cart and show how close they are.

#5. A shorter checkout, with a guest option

Several of Baymard’s reasons point straight at the checkout: forced account creation (18%), a long or complicated process (17%), and not enough payment methods (9%).

How long is too long? Baymard found that “the average US checkout flow contains 23.48 form elements displayed to users by default,” while an ideal flow “can be as short as 12-14 form elements (7-8 if only counting the form fields).” To check your own store, count every field a first-time buyer has to fill in.

What I’d look at, in order:

1. Guest checkout. Let people buy without creating an account. Offer the account after the purchase.
2. Fewer fields. Remove anything you don’t need to ship the order and contact the buyer.
3. More ways to pay. Express wallets and the payment methods your customers actually use.
4. Trust at the payment step. 19% of Baymard’s respondents didn’t trust a site with their credit card information, and 13% named an unsatisfying returns policy. A clear return policy and recognizable payment options help here.

Baymard also says the average large ecommerce site “can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate though better checkout design.” Keep in mind that figure is for large sites. I’d treat it as a sign of how much room checkouts have, not as a promise for a small store.

#6. Mobile checkout and speed

Baymard’s mobile research notes that it’s “not uncommon for mobile e-commerce sites to still have a significantly poorer conversion rate than their desktop counterpart,” in some cases “converting less than half as many visitors into customers.” Compare your mobile and desktop conversion rates in your own reports. A big gap tells you where to look.

On Tycoon Games, a board game store I designed in 2024, every design decision started with the phone experience, and the case study records a mobile conversion rate within 3% of desktop. That’s a store-wide figure, not the result of a before-and-after test.

Speed is part of the same problem. Google’s Core Web Vitals targets are a good yardstick: the main content should load within 2.5 seconds, the page should respond to a tap in less than 200 milliseconds, and the layout shouldn’t jump around (a score of less than 0.1). The Tycoon Games store, which a development partner built and optimized from my design, measured a mobile LCP (main-content load) of 1.6 seconds and an INP (response time) of 113 milliseconds, both inside Google’s targets.

#What I’d fix first on a small store

If you only have a day, work through this list in order and measure after each change:

1. Write down your current funnel numbers (added to cart, reached checkout, completed checkout) as your baseline.
2. Show shipping cost and delivery time in the cart.
3. Turn on guest checkout.
4. Read your “Top online store searches with no results” report and fix the five terms people search for most.
5. Count your checkout fields and remove what you don’t need.
6. Compare mobile and desktop conversion rates, and test your checkout on your own phone.

You’ll notice A/B testing isn’t on the list. Testing needs enough traffic to give a clear answer, which many small stores don’t have yet. Even Optimizely, which makes testing software, tells low-traffic sites to check “how many visitors are needed in each test branch” and to avoid testing areas of a site “that get few hits.” I explain the difference between designing for conversion and testing for it in my post on conversion-focused web design.

If you’d like help with your store, see how I approach ecommerce website design, or book a free 30-minute call.