Rarely do potential buyers land on your website, view a product page, add to their cart, and check out in one go. The chance of that happening is less than 2%.
The way people make purchase decisions is quite “messy,” as Google’s consumer insights reveal.
The buyer’s journey involves a complicated web of touchpoints, and online shoppers are notorious for abandoning their carts.
As an eCommerce business looking to improve your conversion rates, it’s essential to understand what exactly happens in the eCommerce conversion funnel and how to use it to guide shoppers to checkout faster.
Custom image from Canva
The eCommerce conversion funnel is the process shoppers go through, from taking an interest in your brand to completing a purchase on your online store.
Unlike the marketing funnel, where you’re reaching a very distracted audience, the conversion funnel starts when a potential buyer takes an active interest in your business—activates your offer, visits your website, views a product page, etc.
It’s called a conversion funnel because it tracks a shopper’s interaction with your site and helps you identify the key actions shoppers take as they move along the path to purchase.
These actions are in four stages:
It will inform their future interactions, such as making a repeat purchase, advocating for, and recommending your product.
The buyer’s path through the funnel isn’t linear. They enter and exit at different points and encounter friction, which you must resolve to ensure they get to checkout faster.
Key events help you identify pre-purchase exit points and opportunities to drive micro-conversions using targeted campaigns.
Objective: To track shoppers’ behavior and identify patterns or trends.
Why this is important: If you have a limited understanding of how shoppers interact with your website, you're less likely to be able to create a shopping experience that converts visitors into customers.
When shoppers arrive at your online store, they follow a path you’d typically call the buyer’s journey. It represents how they move through your site, including their entry and exit points.
Being able to map out this virtual path enables you to identify what you need to do to guide them to checkout.
You can accomplish this using event-based analytics, heatmaps, session recordings, or user testing.
With these methods, you’ll be able to track:
Another option for identifying common paths your website visitors take is funnel visualization and goal flow reports in Google Analytics.
For example, the Reverse Goal Path report helps you retrace a visitor's steps from beginning their journey to arriving at a conversion.
Knowing their patterns, what they’re looking for, and what motivates them, will equip you with insights into what offers and promotions will most likely convert.
Google Analytics, HotJar, and Amplitude
Objective: To identify what hinders conversion and reduces churn rate.
Why this is important: If potential buyers abandon your conversion funnel before they complete a purchase, it indicates that they need more convincing of the product’s value, can’t afford it, experience friction while browsing, or are dissatisfied with the options presented.
Knowing drop-off points ensures you can find and fix common issues.
To uncover the stages in your eCommerce conversion funnel where many shoppers drop off, analyze the data you gathered earlier when you tracked how visitors browse your site.
In addition to using Google Analytics and heat-mapping tools, you can also:
POWR Poll, CrazyEgg, and Amplitude
Objective: To keep shoppers active until completing the checkout process.
Micro-conversions are small milestones leading up to getting browsers to buy. You need to drive consistent engagement with targeted pop-ups and campaigns to keep shoppers on your website and get them to checkout faster.
From the point of interest and engagement with an offer, you need the plan to move shoppers along their path to purchase in tiny steps.
POWR Popup, Mailchimp, and Facebook Ads
Objective: To help shoppers activate specific offers easier and faster.
Why this is important: If you’re driving traffic from paid ads or inbound and organic channels, sending them to your home page won’t be very effective because homepages are full of distractions.
Landing pages have a single focus that provides shoppers with a clear and concise call to action.
Traffic is hard to earn, so if potential buyers have clicked through to your site, you must deliver personalized content and a well-designed guided shopping experience.
Landing pages help you:
To further improve effectiveness, use A/B testing to analyze different landing page elements and identify which version performs better in conversions.
Google Optimize and Woorise
Objective: To communicate the unique advantages of buying from your store.
Why this is important: You can’t perpetually use pricing or discounts as your leverage. Exploring alternative strategies ensures you can continue to thrive in the competitive eCommerce environment.
New research by Google, based on a simulation of 120,000 shopping scenarios with 1,000 people, shows that people with high-purchase intent for a particular product tend to swap between retailers for their final purchase.
With that in mind, it’s necessary to identify strategies that capture shoppers' attention and motivate them to choose you.
Pablo Pérez, a leading researcher covering the retail industry, recommends that businesses should do so much more than offer discounts because pricing is just one element of the marketing mix.
As you plan your campaigns and design landing pages, add context and relevant information emphasizing the benefits of buying from you over your competitor.
How is this accomplished?
TrustPulse or Yotpo
Objective: Reduce friction at checkout by offering multiple payment methods
Why this is important: Offering multiple ways to pay for your goods and services will ensure a smooth checkout process.
Wondering which payment options you should have? Consider first your geographical target market.
For example, if you are targeting the US for new business, you must, at the very least, offer PayPal and Google Pay. Aiming to find new customers in China? You must offer AliPay and WeChatPay.
Regardless of which options you choose, ensure that you have multiple payment options available reducing the number of lost sales as a result.
Also worth mentioning -- don't forget about credit card payments, ACH, and offline payments as well. You can offer them all with the simple addition of a versatile no-code payment button.
You’ve made it this far; now it’s time to track your progress toward your goals.
These metrics help you identify the specific tactics that are effective and that need to be optimized to improve conversion.
New site visits, product page views, landing page visits, add to cart rate, abandoned cart recovery, check out conversion rate, rate, and repurchase rate.
Define the metrics that matter to you and use them to identify which campaigns are driving the most traffic and sales. It could include click-through rate, average order value (AOV), or revenue per campaign.
It will reveal which customer touchpoints contribute to revenue and track channel effectiveness at each customer journey stage.
Your conversion rates determine whether your ecommerce business thrives or fails, and optimizing the eCommerce conversion funnel is the primary way to effectively drive shoppers to your online store, lead them through each stage, and convert them to customers.
Ready to improve conversions? Explore all POWR apps and plugins specifically designed to help you boost conversions.
Kachi Eloka is a freelance B2B SaaS content writer specializing in e-commerce, marketing technology (MarTech), and productivity software.
She enjoys talking about the growth strategies of DTC brands and tech startups. She’s busy watching films, reading books, and learning to play the ukulele when she's not working.