Last updated Mon Dec 09 2024
Ecommerce CRO: 15 Techniques & Expert Tips
Every business is unique, so you need only tested, proven, and effective ecommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) tips.
That's the goal of this guide—
Give you tried-and-tested techniques to improve ecommerce conversion rate and show how successful stores have done it.
Get started:
Boost conversions without the big price tag
Optimize your site with CRO experiments, detailed analytics, A/B testing, and lead capture tools—all at a cost-effective price.
Interested in CRO?
This conversion rate optimization guide and CRO tools list has everything to get you started.
Also, learn how to build a website conversion funnel to build a clear pathway for your visitors to convert.
What is ecommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO)?
Ecommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a continuous, data-driven process of increasing conversions and sales by enhancing an online store's design, marketing messages, and UX, through testing and improvements.
Effective ecommerce CRO seeks to optimize the key online store elements from a customer-centric perspective. That ensures that every visitor has a personalized experience. Getting that perspective means finding and removing barriers to conversions, which is done with tools like CRO A/B testing, analytics, and customer feedback.
Holistic approach to ecommerce CRO
"Sometimes, it's easy to think of ecommerce CRO as on-page optimization, focusing first on the page with the biggest conversion potential. Once that page generate better results, the CRO efforts are focused on the next one.
However, an online store is a system where changes in one part, say, a page, can sometimes negatively affect another, or even hurt the overall performance. So it's better to consider the entire store, including other pages, categories, and campaigns. Moreover, considering what happens before the customers land at your store (traffic sources, ad campaigns, etc.) and after (lead nurturing campaigns) is also important."
Types of ecommerce conversion points
Conversion happens when a visitor executes a desired action, which doesn't always mean placing an order. Even a click can be considered a conversion point because it can lead the customer closer to purchasing. Defining the most important conversion points for your business is the first step towards creating effective marketing campaigns.
Here are the most common conversion points in ecommerce:
| Ecommerce CRO point | Definition |
|---|---|
| Opt-in | Happens when a visitor submits their info (emails, phone numbers, product preferences) in a signup form or a popup |
| Click | Clicks in CTA buttons, website popups, banners, sticky bars, product versions, etc. |
| Purchase | Achieved when someone has placed an order on a website |
| Engagement | A desired way a visitor could interact with a website, eg watching a product video, seeing an offer, applying a discount to the cart |
| Phone call | Achieved when a person calls the business to inquire about a product or service |
See stories of marketers who have been there
This list of ecommerce case studies includes campaigns for all ecommerce CRO points as well as the performance data.
Ecommerce conversion rate optimization techniques
1. Delay displaying your newsletter signup campaign
Many online stores blast visitors with a newsletter popup as soon as they land on the website. But this can be off-putting, especially for new visitors who need time to understand what you're selling. So, over 90% of them are likely to close that popup.
Consider adding a delay to your newsletter signup campaign to give the visitors more time to look around. Most apps for creating ecommerce popups have this option.
For example, you can show the popup:
after 15 seconds after the visitor arrives. This one worth trying if most visitors don't go past homepage
on the second or third page they visit. If the Behavior section in your GA4 shows that visitors view no fewer than two pages on average
when a visitor reaches 50% of the page depth. Check visit recordings in your chosen heatmap tool to see how deep your visitors are scrolling
Here's how the display settings look for a campaign that appears on the third page (On Landing + After delay at the bottom):
See how other stores collect emails:
Get an app to collect emails:
2. Use popups strategically
Over 60% of Shopify stores use popups, but mostly for newsletter signups. But popups are a versatile tool that can help improve ecommerce conversion rate in dozens of ways.
Think about it this way:
A popup is a way to put something in front of your visitors. If you manage to make the message contextual, then it won't be seen as intrusive.
"Popups are like ads. People don't like them, so we made them fun. A really good popup doesn't feel like a popup at all."
Ben Mateo, Head of Growth and Tech, Asphalte
Here are a few examples of such campaigns.
This one is about helping customers choose the right item by offering help in the form of a product quiz (this campaign appears only on product pages, after a time delay):
Improve the visibility and engagement of a new seasonal product by promoting it prominently on the homepage:
Encourage the customer with a product in the cart to finish the order by reminding them about free shipping and showing a review from a satisfied customer:
Or—
Get more loyalty program members by highlighting its benefits in a popup that appears only when the visitor clicks a "Get more info" button:
Or—
Present a special limited-time offer with a gift that appears only to registered shoppers during their birthday week:
Conversion optimization for an ecommerce website with popups can work for businesses of all sizes.
But you'll need a popup tool with advanced audience management and display frequency features to choose who sees the campaigns and when exactly.
Example—
Look how diverse the audience display settings are in an advanced popup builder. You can choose your campaign to be displayed only to visitors from paid ads, only returning visitors, only visitors from a certain city or country, etc.:
By making your campaigns contextual, ie. showing on specific pages to specific groups of users, you can make them more relevant and strategic.
As a result, you can do conversion optimization for your ecommerce store and increase signups, clicks, and engagements.
Want to see the top-rated app options? Here are the best popup software for online stores.
Have a Shopify store? Then these Shopify popup apps will be more relevant.
3. Make products easy to find
Do you think your store is well-structured but visitors don't discover many of your products? To make sure that your products are easier to find, you can add links to them to the homepage without cluttering it.
One way to do so is with onsite notifications. They are a social media-inspired feed for websites housed in the header. The feed is designed to promote products and announcements, which improves discovery:
Online stores use onsite notifications for ecommerce conversion rate optimization. Black Ember, a California-based brand, improved engagement with its new products by making dedicated campaigns.
“Our first priority is to provide our community with a positive, engaging, and easy-to-use UX. We have found [onsite notifications] to perfectly complement the design and functionality of our website.”
Black Ember
This onsite notification promoted a recently launched product: the Sacoche tactical pack.
Over 14 days, 2,330 visitors opened the notification (“Clicked” in the image below), which translated into 18.4% CTR.
Of those, 545 (or 23.4%) went to check out the item:
The next announcement of a limited edition product was also effective, achieving a 29.4% click-through rate (CTR).
Of those who viewed the notification, 2,059 viewed the product, resulting in a 30.2% conversion rate (CVR):
Tip: Combine two onsite notifications with emails to maximize the engagement with new products.
Make the first pre-launch campaign and add the email signup form to build the waiting list. Then, send out email alerts and publish the second notification to drive traffic to the product when it launches.
To learn more:
Check out why notifications are an effective ecommerce CRO tool.
Or—check out stories of businesses using notifications.
Ecommerce CRO case study
OddBalls, a popular UK underwear brand, generated $50,000 with one onsite notification campaign with a discount.
4. Combine multiple onsite campaigns
This ecommerce conversion rate optimization tip is about increasing engagement with sales and other limited-time offers. For example, if you're having a sale where customers need to apply a coupon code to the cart, you can combine an announcement campaign and a code campaign.
Charlotte Bio did exactly that for a six-hour-long flash sale.
The brand announced the campaign (the first one) with a popup on the homepage. It contained the details as well as the button to apply the code:
Many visitors may close the campaign without copying the code first (maybe they wanted to learn more about considering buying, for example).
To make the discount code easily accessible for them, the second campaign was used: a sticky bar. This non-intrusive campaign appeared only to those who didn't copy the code:
At the end of the sale, the bar generated 99 more code applications than the popup, proving that many shoppers needed more time to decide whether to buy.
Altogether, the campaigns generated 17% of the sales Charlotte Bio made that month.
“The campaign generated six times more customers in six hours than we get on a full regular day, which we really did not expect.”
Marilou Bertrand, Director of Digital Marketing, Charlotte Bio
Learn more about this ecommerce CRO case study.
You can also watch an interview of Marilou Bertrand about her experience with this campaign (in French):
5. Add a wishlist (traditional and AI)
A wishlist allows customers to save items they are interested in but not ready to purchase yet. This way, they can easily come back and complete their purchase later.
There are two kinds of wishlists you can have:
traditional wishlist
AI Wishlist
A traditional wishlist allows customers to save items and access them later. It requires additions from the customer's side.
The AI Wishlist uses a machine learning algorithm to track customer activity and analyze sales performances of products.
Let's see AI Wishlist in action.
I came across some interesting items on OddBalls and then headed back to the homepage. There, I noticed an animated bell with unread messages, offering to look at the products I'd checked out (the first message in the notification feed):
The list isn’t just random: it’s organized by an AI algorithm.
It looks at browsing activity (both mine and other visitors'), how well each item sells, and my profile if I’m registered. It predicts what I might want to buy and bumps those items to the top.
Both traditional and AI Wishlist run on autopilot, so you can add both of them to your ecommerce store.
🔔 Learn more about AI Wishlist
More options: Best wishlist apps for Shopify
AI Wishlist case study
Emoi emoi generated 11.4% order rate from clicks in recommendations made by AI Wishlist.
6. A/B test campaigns and pages
A/B testing is a popular ecommerce CRO technique that allows you to compare different versions of pages or campaigns to determine which one performs better. This can help you improve website conversions and sales.
Specifically, you can create different variations of:
landing pages
product pages
email campaigns
checkout processes
onsite campaigns (signup forms, popups)
One way to implement A/B testing is by using an A/B testing tool. Some of the best A/B testing software for ecommerce conversion rate optimization is Optimizely for landing pages and Wisepops for onsite campaigns.
Quick example: thanks to A/B testing, Faguo, a clothing store, was able to improve the click-through rate of lead generation campaigns from 15% to 25%.
Doing A/B tests can be done with little to no experience. For example, check out this 2-min video on how to create tests for signup forms:
7. Collect feedback with website surveys
Website surveys are an effective conversion rate optimization technique for ecommerce websites because they can provide both quantitative (ratings) and qualitative (answers, comments) data from customers.
Website surveys are popular because:
They can be targeted to qualify respondents
They require minimal upkeep; there's no need to monitor them
Results are generally simple to interpret, as you can restrict the types of responses
Surveys enable the collection of both quantitative data through closed questions and qualitative insights via open-ended questions.
Speaking of data, you can collect info about how visitors found you, why they are leaving without purchasing, what you can improve, what likely they are to recommend you, etc.
Here are a couple of examples:
Neom Cosmetics asks why the visitor is leaving and giving a few very specific answers to make it easy to respond:
Next—
Kookai is asking how likely the visitor is to recommend the brand to a friend with this simple NPS survey:
Expert comment:
Consider live chat as a way to collect qualitative feedback. You can communicate with customers in real time and get detailed answers—and you can ask these questions almost every customer that gets in touch with you via the chat widget. Plus, you can get a live chat on your store for free.
More about methods to collect and analyze feedback:
8. Design a mobile commerce conversion strategy
Mobile shoppers are expected to make 53.2% of all sales during the 2024 holiday season, surpassing the desktop. That's why a mobile strategy is a big part of ecommerce CRO.
Consider these ideas:
make sure that CTA buttons are easy to click
add more payment-friendly payment methods
make mobile-optimized popups that comply with Google's rules
be active on social media to be able to drive traffic to your store
run mobile surveys to find potential problems
Learn how to design mobile campaigns:
9. Show upsell offers after a visitor adds an item to cart
One effective way to upsell is to show your upsell offer immediately when a visitor adds something to the shopping cart.
It can be done via special cart widgets that appear on the side of the screen...
Or in popup windows that confirm that the item has been added:
Usually, such campaigns contain a few products (ideally, related or complementary) so the shoppers can easily view them.
See how online stores use upsell popups.
10. Engage visitors with exit campaigns
Exit-intent campaigns can convert an extra 2% of your visitors, with the best-performing campaigns reaching 19%. They give an extra incentive or another reason to reconsider leaving, thus helping reduce the exit rate (the percentage of visitors who leave after visiting a page).
Exit-intent campaigns often contain:
extra discounts for buying within X hours
free shipping for orders over a certain value
customer reviews for products on that page
reminders of items left in the shopping cart
links to quizzes that help with choosing products
special limited-time offers including items on that page
You can try any of these on your store with exit intent popup software.
Example:
This exit-intent campaign gives a 10% discount coupon to visitors who have items in the shopping cart:
Expert tip:
If some pages have high bounce rates even after you tried exit campaigns, consider taking a second look at the page content. Changing the incentive might also work—and should be considered if your audience insights tools show that visitors stay an appreciable amount of time on those pages.
More inspiration:
20+ exit intent popup examples [from ecommerce stores]
11. Use gamified campaigns
Gamified campaigns use game-like elements such as spinning wheels, scratch cards, and prize reveals to create excitement and motivate actions from visitors. That's why they convert three times more visitors than traditional popups, if used for special occasions.
Ideas for gamified campaigns you can consider:
spin-to-win wheels with discounts and free shipping
Easter egg hunt for extra discounts
digital scratch cards revealing mystery bonuses
A typical spin wheel looks like this (below)—it collects both emails and phone numbers. For more, check out these examples of gamified popups.
This quick tutorial will show you how easy it is to create a spin wheel (this one is made for St. Patrick's Day):
A gamified campaign tip for ecommerce CRO from the marketing team at Soi Paris:
Have an egg hunt in your store for the Easter weekend.
12. Observe how visitors navigate your website
To improve the user experience, it's important to observe how visitors navigate your website. This is commonly known as a heatmap or click map.
A heatmap visually displays where and how often visitors click on a webpage. It uses color coding to show the intensity of clicks in different areas of the page, with red indicating the most clicks and blue indicating the least.
By analyzing the heatmap data, you can identify which elements on your webpage are getting the most attention and adjust accordingly. For example, if you notice that a particular button or link is not being clicked as much as others, you may want to move it to a more prominent location.
Some popular tools for creating heatmaps include Hotjar and Lucky Orange.
Learn more about them: list of the best ecommerce tools.
Expert comment:
Conversion rate optimization is not the same as website usability.
Although the two are similar and overlap, they're not quite the same. While CRO is all about increasing revenues, usability is concerned with making the websites easier to use. For example, if you make your store easier to use, it's possible that the changes will hurt conversions and produce less profitable conversions. A/B testing is often the best way to improve usability while also boosting conversions.
13. Provide reviews to support your claims
Customer reviews are the best evidence you can get for ecommerce CRO. Over 90% of online shoppers say that online reviews have an impact on their buying decisions.
Place customer reviews directly on relevant product pages instead of having a dedicated reviews page. This makes the "evidence" more contextual, allowing shoppers to easily see how others have benefitted from a product or service.
Also, you can add how many 5-star reviews your products have right below the CTA button on the homepage, like Blume:
Expert comment:
Popups are the one store element where adding reviews can be an exception. Adding them to exit-intent campaigns can extend a visitor's stay in your store by offering additional social proof to those who may require it.
14. Improve product descriptions and images
To enhance the effectiveness of your product pages, focus on the precision and appeal of product descriptions and images.
Begin by creating clear and concise product descriptions that present the products from the customers' perspective, highlighting how they address their problems and needs.
This guide to writing effective product descriptions with examples will be useful if you need practical tips.
Next, ensure images are high-quality and appropriately sized to showcase the product at its best. Use lifestyle photos that help customers envision themselves using the product. Also, videos and gifs can be highly effective for online store CRO, as they provide a more interactive way to showcase your products.
Get product page inspiration from the most successful Shopify stores:
15. Make sure your checkout flow is smooth
A smooth checkout flow is a crucial ecommerce CRO technique because it can reduce cart abandonment and improve online sales.
The essential steps to optimizing the ecommerce checkout include:
Minimize the number of steps to complete a purchase
Create a simplified, clear, linear progression to encourage transaction completion
Offer various payment options (credit cards, digital wallets, and "pay later" solutions)
Include trust symbols and upsell messages on the checkout page
For more detailed tips, go to this guide to reducing cart abandonment.
This typical Shopify checkout has been beautifully optimized by Pura Vida. There are trust signals ("perks of every order"), a bar that drives the sense of urgency (the top left corner), mobile payment methods, and a small upsell message (the gift box):
Summary
I hope these ecommerce conversion optimization tips and tactics will improve your strategy as well as conversions and sales in your online store. Feel free to try them as well as A/B test your campaigns to maximize the performance.
For more insights, please check out more guides on our blog:
Oleksii Kovalenko
Oleksii Kovalenko is a digital marketing expert and a writer with a degree in international marketing. He has seven years of experience helping ecommerce store owners promote their businesses by writing detailed, in-depth guides.
Education:
Master's in International Marketing, Academy of Municipal Administration
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