More traffic is not always the answer, and it is almost never the cheapest one. E-commerce growth starts by finding where customers hesitate, abandon or fail to return, then ordering the changes that improve conversion, order value and repeat purchases by what each one is actually worth.
Let us do the sums, because they settle this argument faster than any opinion can. Say your shop takes 40,000 visits a month, converts 1.2 per cent of them, and the average order is 70 euros. That is 480 orders and 33,600 euros. Now double the traffic. Same conversion rate, 67,200 euros, and an acquisition bill that has doubled along with it.
Alternatively, leave the traffic exactly where it is and move conversion from 1.2 per cent to 1.6 per cent, which is the kind of shift that comes from repairing a checkout and rewriting three product pages. That is 640 orders and 44,800 euros, earned from visitors you had already paid for, with no increase in advertising at all. Add a modest lift in average order value and a retention programme that brings a slice of them back, and the two paths are not remotely comparable in cost.
However, this is arithmetic and not a forecast. Whether 1.6 per cent is reachable in your shop depends entirely on what is actually wrong with it today, and that is precisely the question this work answers first.
Six patterns account for most of it in mid-sized shops. They are rarely dramatic on their own, which is exactly why they survive for years.
Everything else is a variation on one of them. Knowing which of the three your shop has the most headroom in is half the job.
Conversion. Removing the friction, the doubt and the missing information between the product page and the confirmed order. Usually the cheapest lever, and usually the most neglected.
Average order value. Sensible bundling, honest recommendations, shipping thresholds that make sense, and merchandising that helps rather than nags.
Retention. The second and third purchase cost a fraction of the first, which is why lifecycle email, post-purchase care and reorder timing tend to pay for themselves quickly.
The review looks at your shop the way a customer experiences it and the way your data records it, then reconciles the two. Those two accounts disagree more often than anyone expects, and the gap between them is where most of the opportunity sits.
Landing, searching, browsing a category, comparing two products, adding to the basket, hesitating, checking out, receiving the confirmation, waiting for delivery, and deciding whether to come back. Each of those is a place a shop can lose somebody, and each one leaves a trace in the data if you know where to look.
Every field, every step, every unexpected cost and every moment of doubt gets examined, on a phone as well as on a desktop. Checkout is where the customers you have already paid for are lost, which makes it the most expensive part of the shop to leave alone.
Analytics and funnel tracking are checked before any finding is written, because a recommendation built on a misconfigured event is worse than no recommendation at all. Where the measurement is broken, fixing it is the first item on the roadmap rather than an afterthought.
Every finding carries an estimate of what it costs to fix and what it is plausibly worth. Some of the best items are an afternoon of a developer’s time. Others are a replatforming project, and you deserve to know which is which before anybody starts.
Read access to the shop, the analytics and the ad accounts, then a first pass over what the numbers say is happening.
The shop walked end to end as a customer, on mobile and desktop, with every hesitation point recorded.
Where people drop out, what is stopping them, and what is being left on the table after the first order.
Effort against impact for every finding, ordered so the cheap valuable work is unmistakable.
A working session with the people who will do the work, so the roadmap survives contact with your development queue.
Seventeen years of marketing and e-commerce work, including the parts nobody writes conference talks about: shipping thresholds, returns policies, product data quality and the endless argument about whether the newsletter is annoying people. Shops are won on that detail far more often than on strategy.
The review is platform-neutral. There is no partner commission waiting at the end of it, no preferred replatforming project, and no interest in recommending a rebuild when three targeted fixes would do the same job for a fraction of the money.
What is not on offer: guaranteed conversion uplift, guaranteed revenue, and a backlog so long that nobody ever starts it.
A real client example belongs here: the shop as it was found, the three changes that were made first, and what moved. Left empty on purpose rather than filled with an invented story.
Almost certainly. Shopify, WooCommerce, Shopware and the other common systems are all familiar territory, and the analysis is deliberately platform-neutral because the customer does not care what the shop runs on. Where a finding depends on something specific to your platform, that is said explicitly rather than glossed over.
Conversion is the largest single part of it, but stopping there would miss half the money. The review also covers average order value and retention, because a shop that converts well and never sees the customer again is still leaving a great deal on the table. All three get looked at, and the findings are ranked against each other.
The review itself ends with a prioritised backlog your own team or agency can execute, and many shops are perfectly capable of taking it from there. Where you would rather hand parts over, that is scoped separately once you have seen the findings and decided what is worth doing.
Yes, and it usually helps. Acquisition and shop experience are the same funnel viewed from two ends, and a checkout problem will happily look like an advertising problem in the reporting. If acquisition turns out to be the larger issue, that will be said plainly rather than quietly bundled into a shop project.
Read access to the shop administration, your web analytics and, where relevant, your advertising accounts and email platform. Read access only, so nothing can be changed during the review. What exactly is needed gets listed before anything starts, because access is normally the step that delays these projects.
Request a call. We look at your conversion, your checkout and your repeat business, and you will get an honest read on which of the three levers has the most headroom for you.
Request a callPlatform-neutral · fixed scope · no lock-in
