Driving traffic to an ecommerce store is only part of the challenge. The more important question is what happens once shoppers arrive: can they find what they need, understand the product, trust the retailer and complete their purchase without unnecessary friction?
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the ongoing process of identifying those barriers and improving the customer journey. It isn't about making one major change and expecting results overnight. Instead, it involves understanding how customers use your site, identifying where they drop off and continually testing ways to improve their experience.
There is also no single "good" ecommerce conversion rate that applies to every retailer. Conversion varies significantly by sector, product, traffic source, device, price point and customer intent, so your own historical performance is often a more useful benchmark than a generic industry average.
What is an ecommerce conversion rate?
An ecommerce conversion rate measures the proportion of website visitors who complete a desired action.
For most ecommerce retailers, the primary conversion is a completed purchase. However, other actions can also be useful indicators of engagement depending on your objectives, including:
Adding a product to a basket
Adding a product to a wishlist
Signing up for an email list
Requesting more information
Creating an account
Starting the checkout process
These shouldn't necessarily be treated as equivalent to a sale. Instead, they can help you understand where customers are progressing through the journey and where they may be dropping out.
How do you calculate ecommerce conversion rate?
For completed purchases, the basic calculation is:
Conversion rate = (Number of purchases ÷ Number of website visitors) × 100
For example, if 1,000 visitors came to your website during a given period and 20 completed a purchase:
(20 ÷ 1,000) × 100 = 2% conversion rate
It is important to define the measurement period and audience consistently when comparing results. Looking at conversion by device, channel, landing page or customer type can reveal issues that a single overall figure may hide.
15 ways to improve your ecommerce conversion rate
There is no single change that will consistently improve conversion across every ecommerce store. The most effective approach is to combine behavioural data, customer feedback and testing to identify the specific barriers affecting your customers.
These 15 strategies provide only a starting point.
1. Understand how visitors use your website
Before changing your website, establish what is currently happening.
Look beyond your overall conversion rate and examine the customer journey from landing page through to purchase. Analytics can show where visitors enter, which pages they view, how far they progress through checkout and where they leave.
Segmenting this data can be particularly useful. A healthy desktop conversion rate, for example, could mask a significant mobile usability problem.
You can also use tools such as session recordings, heatmaps and on-site search data to understand how visitors interact with specific pages.
The aim is to identify problems based on evidence rather than making changes based on assumptions.
2. Identify your site's friction points
Once you understand how visitors behave, look for areas where the experience is creating unnecessary friction.
This could include:
A product search that returns poor or irrelevant results
Important information that is difficult to find
Product pages that don't answer common questions
Unexpected delivery costs
A checkout form that asks for unnecessary information
Poor mobile navigation
Errors that aren't clearly explained
Your analytics can tell you where customers are dropping off, while qualitative research can help explain why.
Even your site's FAQs can provide useful clues. If customers repeatedly ask the same question, the answer may need to be more visible earlier in the buying journey.
3. Optimise website speed and performance
Speed is closely connected to the customer experience. Shoppers expect ecommerce websites to respond quickly, particularly on mobile devices.
Google has previously found that 53% of mobile visitors will leave a site if a page takes more than three seconds to load. Portent's research into B2C ecommerce sites also found that pages loading in one second had an ecommerce conversion rate 2.5 times higher than pages loading in five seconds.
Improving performance means looking beyond a single page-load figure. Review images, scripts, third-party integrations, hosting, caching and the underlying platform to identify what is slowing the experience down.
4. Design for every device
A responsive website should provide a consistent experience across desktop, mobile and tablet, but simply making a desktop layout fit a smaller screen isn't enough.
Consider how customers actually shop on each device. Navigation, search, product galleries, filters, forms and checkout fields should all be easy to use without unnecessary scrolling, zooming or tapping.
Test key journeys on real devices and pay particular attention to the path from product discovery to checkout.
5. Improve your product pages
Product pages need to answer the questions that prevent customers from buying.
High-quality imagery, clear descriptions, accurate specifications, availability information, delivery details and reviews all help shoppers make an informed decision.
Consider what information someone would want if they were standing in a physical shop with the product in front of them. The more effectively your product page replicates that confidence online, the less reason a customer has to leave the site to find additional information.
6. Use personalisation where it adds value
Personalisation can make a large catalogue easier to navigate by presenting customers with products and content that are more relevant to them.
This could include recommendations based on previous purchases, recently viewed products, related products or segmented email campaigns.
The important point is relevance. Personalisation should make the shopping journey easier rather than simply adding more content or promotional messages.
7. Offer the payment methods customers expect
Payment is one of the final steps between browsing and completing a purchase, so unnecessary restrictions at this stage can result in lost sales.
Offer payment methods that are appropriate for your audience, such as debit and credit cards, digital wallets and other relevant payment options.
The objective isn't to provide every possible payment method. It's to understand how your customers prefer to pay and make those options clear and easy to use.
8. Make calls to action clear
A customer shouldn't have to work out what to do next.
Calls to action should clearly communicate the next step, whether that's adding a product to the basket, starting checkout, requesting a quote or signing up for an account.
Good CTA design isn't about making every button bright or adding more buttons to a page. Instead, make the primary action clear within the context of the customer's journey and ensure it remains easy to find on different screen sizes.
9. Build trust with reviews and user-generated content
Customers naturally look for reassurance before committing to a purchase, particularly when buying from a retailer for the first time.
PowerReviews' 2025 research found that 95% of surveyed consumers regularly read product reviews, while only 43% said they would buy a product with no ratings or reviews.
Reviews, customer photographs, testimonials and other forms of user-generated content can provide evidence from people who have already bought and used the product.
Make this content easy to find rather than hiding it at the bottom of the product page. Where appropriate, include reviews alongside product information, ratings and customer questions.
10. Make navigation intuitive
Good navigation reduces the amount of work customers need to do to find a product.
Use clear categories, logical product groupings and filters that reflect how customers actually shop. Search should also handle common variations in terminology and help customers find relevant products even when they don't know the exact product name.
Review your internal search data regularly. If customers are repeatedly searching for products or terms that are difficult to find through your navigation, that's a useful signal that the experience needs improvement.
11. Give customers help when they need it
Some customers will have questions that product information can't answer.
Live chat, messaging and other support options can provide assistance during the buying journey, particularly for products that require more consideration.
Automation can handle straightforward questions, but customers should have an easy route to human support when an issue becomes more complicated.
The aim is to remove uncertainty at the point where it could otherwise prevent a purchase.
12. Consider social commerce
Social platforms can play an important role in product discovery, particularly when customers encounter products through creators, recommendations or visual content.
Where relevant to your audience, make it easy for customers to move from social content to the appropriate product page and maintain a consistent experience between the two.
Social shouldn't replace your ecommerce site, but it can become another route into your product catalogue and an important part of the wider customer journey.
13. Simplify the checkout
Checkout is one of the most important areas to optimise because customers have already demonstrated strong purchase intent.
Baymard's research puts average cart abandonment at around 70%, although a significant proportion of abandonment is caused by factors such as browsing behaviour and price rather than poor UX. Its research also found that the average large ecommerce site could potentially increase conversion by 35% through checkout design improvements alone.
Common areas to review include:
Allowing guest checkout
Reducing unnecessary form fields
Showing delivery costs and options clearly
Making errors easy to understand and correct
Offering preferred payment methods
Keeping the checkout focused on completing the purchase
Baymard's research also found that unexpected costs, forced account creation and lengthy or complicated checkout processes were among the leading reasons for abandonment.
14. Recover abandoned baskets
Not every abandoned basket represents a lost sale. Some shoppers are comparing prices, researching products or simply aren't ready to purchase yet.
For customers who have provided the necessary consent and contact information, abandoned basket emails can provide a useful reminder and give them a straightforward route back to their basket.
Avoid assuming that every abandoned basket needs a discount. A simple reminder, product information or clarification of delivery options may be more appropriate than immediately reducing the price.
15. Combine analytics with customer feedback
Analytics can tell you what is happening, but they don't always tell you why.
Combine quantitative data with customer feedback, usability testing, customer service enquiries, surveys and reviews to build a clearer picture of the shopping experience.
For example, if analytics show that a large proportion of customers leave a product page, customer feedback might reveal that shoppers can't find information about delivery times. That gives you a specific problem to solve rather than simply a percentage to improve.
Conversion rate optimisation works best as a continuous cycle:
Measure → identify → test → learn → improve → measure again.
Conversion rate optimisation is an ongoing process
Improving conversion isn't about implementing 15 changes and expecting an immediate increase in sales. Different retailers have different customers, products, price points and buying journeys, so the most effective strategy will depend on what your own data reveals.
Start by establishing a reliable baseline, identify the biggest sources of friction and prioritise changes based on their potential impact. Then test, measure and continue refining the experience.
The platform underneath your store also plays a role. If making relatively simple changes requires extensive development work, relies on multiple third-party plugins or is restricted by your platform's capabilities, optimisation becomes harder to sustain.
A flexible ecommerce platform can give retailers and their agencies greater control over the customer journey, from product discovery and personalisation through to checkout and payment.
Looking for a platform that gives you more control over your ecommerce experience?
Book a demo to see how Aero can support a flexible, high-performance store built around your customers and your requirements.
