Grow Ecommerce Sales
Grow ecommerce sales: find the number holding your store back
To grow ecommerce sales, find the weakest of four numbers: visits, conversion rate, average order value or repeat rate. It’s rarely visits.
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Four numbers multiplied together
Your online revenue for any period is visits, times conversion rate, times average order value, times how often customers come back. Everything you could do to grow the store changes one of those four numbers, and because they multiply, the weakest drags the whole result down far more than you’d expect.
A ten per cent gain on your weakest number is worth more than a thirty per cent gain on your strongest, and is almost always cheaper to get. Yet stores spend years buying more visits, because traffic is the one you can buy on a card this afternoon.
So before suggesting anything, we check where each number sits against what’s possible in your category, and how high each can realistically go. An expensive product people think hard about won’t convert like a cheap everyday one, whatever you do to the page. Knowing which limit you’ve hit is as useful as knowing where there’s room to grow.
How it fits together
The four numbers behind online store revenue
Because the numbers multiply, the weakest one caps the other three. Write your own figures next to each before you read on.
- Sessions
- How many people reach the store, and how many of them land on a page that sells something.
- Conversion rate
- The share of visits that end in an order. Check phones and desktops separately.
- Average order value
- What one order is worth before discounts, and before the cost of delivering it.
- Repeat rate
- How often the same customer comes back. The only one of the four with no ad cost attached.
Find the weak one
How to tell which number is holding back ecommerce sales
Each number shows its weakness in its own way and gets fixed in a different place. Tell them apart before anyone commits budget.
| Dimension | What it looks like in the data | Most likely cause | Where the fix happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traffic | Few visits, and almost none from organic searches that don’t include your brand name | No proper category pages, or filter URLs eating up Google’s crawl time | Site structure, category pages, technical SEO, paid reach |
| Conversion rate | Healthy visits, lots of abandoned carts, few mobile checkouts completed | Slow pages, thin product details, unclear delivery and returns terms | Product and cart pages, checkout, page speed, content that builds trust |
| Average order value | Orders arrive steadily and nearly all of them are for one item | No bundles, no reason to add more, add-on suggestions that don’t fit | Merchandising, bundles, shipping thresholds, cart design |
| Repeat rate | Strong first orders, very few second orders, rising cost to win customers | No follow-up after purchase, or a delivery experience that disappointed | Email and lifecycle marketing, fulfilment, product quality |
What to change
What moves each of the four numbers
Traffic: category pages before blog posts
Most ecommerce searches that don’t name your brand are for a type of product with a detail attached, made long before people know a product name. Category pages need useful content, sensible handling of filters and good internal links. That’s a job for site structure, not more posts.
Conversion: information, speed and clear delivery terms
Most abandoned carts aren’t design failures but unanswered questions. When will it arrive? What does shipping cost? Can I send it back? Will it fit? Answering those clearly before checkout lifts conversion more reliably than any layout change.
Order value: thresholds and sensible bundles
A free shipping threshold set just above your current average order is the most reliable option here. Next come bundles of things that belong together. Sliders of loosely related products slow the page and do very little else.
Repeat rate: the cheapest number to move
It’s the only one of the four with no ad cost. Send follow-up emails timed to when the product is likely to run out or wear out, and make delivery an experience people want to repeat.
Common mistakes
Three ways stores work on the wrong number for a year
- Buying traffic to cover a conversion problem.
- If your store converts below the norm for its category, every extra visitor is bought at full price and wasted at the same rate as the last. Your cost to win customers rises until the maths stops working, and people conclude the channel stopped working when the site had been losing buyers all along.
- Publishing content that will never sell anything.
- Stores write buying guides and top-ten lists because someone said ecommerce needs content, while the category pages that could rank for buying searches sit as bare grids of thumbnails. The visitors are real but aren’t shopping, so traffic rises and revenue doesn’t.
- Treating repeat customers as a loyalty scheme.
- Stores add points and tiers before checking whether the first purchase was good enough to earn a second. If delivery was slow, the packaging poor or returns a hassle, a discount won’t fix it. Fix the experience, then ask for the next order when the customer is likely to need it.
How we’d run it
Find the weak number, then fix the cheapest things first
The numbers that cost nothing in ads come before the ones that cost money every month.
Get the four numbers right
We pull visits by channel, conversion rate by device and traffic type, average order value by category, and the share of revenue from returning customers. Most stores can’t produce the repeat rate, and it’s often the weakest number.
You get: A twelve-month starting point for all four numbers
Find the limits, as well as the gaps
We compare each number with what’s realistic in your category and price range, and tell you if a number you planned to invest in is already near its limit. That saves a quarter of expensive disappointment.
You get: An estimate of the room to grow on each number
Fix the free things first
Make delivery and returns clear, fill gaps in product information, remove checkout friction, set a shipping threshold and start a follow-up sequence after purchase. These lift conversion, order value and repeat rate without adding a monthly ad cost.
You get: Changes made on the site and in your emails
Rebuild how the store shows up in search
Sort out category structure, filter pages, internal links and product data. It’s slow, structural work, so it starts early even though results come late, and it keeps growing without ongoing spend.
You get: A category and filter structure, plus a technical plan
Grow paid ads on top of a fixed site
Once the site converts properly and repeat customers are coming back, you can push paid ads harder. You can afford to pay more for a first order, because a second order is now fairly likely.
You get: An ad plan based on what customers are worth over time
Questions
Common questions about growing ecommerce sales
Which of the four numbers should we work on first?
The one that’s weakest compared with what’s normal in your category. Because the numbers multiply, the weakest one holds back the rest. A store converting at half the rate of its peers gains more from a modest conversion lift than from a big jump in traffic, and conversion work costs less to keep up.
The exception is a number already close to its limit for your category. Expensive products people think hard about naturally convert lower, and pushing past that limit costs a lot.
Why do our product pages get no organic traffic?
Usually because people search for a category and a detail, like "waterproof hiking boots", long before they know a product name. Category and subcategory pages catch most of that demand; product pages tend to rank only for brand and model searches.
The other common cause is filter navigation, which can create thousands of near-identical URLs. Google spends its crawl time on those and misses the pages that could rank. On a big catalogue, this alone can hold back organic growth for years.
Is SEO worth it for ecommerce when we already run ads?
It depends on whether your ads make a profit on the first order. If they do, and they scale, organic search improves your margin. If the first order loses money and repeat orders have to win it back, your business depends on repeat customers.
Organic and paid also do different jobs in retail. Ads catch people who already know what they want. Organic catches people earlier, while they’re researching and building a shortlist, which ads usually can’t reach at a sensible cost.
How do we raise average order value without discounting?
Try bundles, lower prices for buying more, relevant add-ons at the cart, and a free shipping threshold set just above your current average order. The threshold is the most reliable and easiest to test, and changes how people shop without changing any prices.
Recommendation sliders of loosely related products tend not to work. If the suggestion isn’t clearly useful with what’s in the basket, it just slows the page down.
Our repeat rate is low. Is that a marketing problem?
Partly, but check the product and delivery first. If people rarely buy twice in a category they normally rebuy, something disappointed them: delivery time, packaging, condition on arrival or an annoying returns process.
If the experience is good, the usual problem is that nobody asked for the second order. A well-timed email sequence after purchase, sent when the product is likely to run out or wear out, is the cheapest growth most stores can get.
Where to get help
Services that solve this
Ecommerce SEO
Ecommerce SEO for stores with large catalogues. We decide which filter, category and product pages Google should index, merge or redirect.Conversion Rate Optimisation
Conversion rate optimisation that gets you more enquiries from the traffic you already have. We fix what stops visitors, and A/B test only when your traffic supports it.Technical SEO
Technical SEO makes sure Google can crawl, read and index your pages, and that your site is fast. We fix what blocks them so the rest of your SEO can pay off.
Find out which of your four numbers is the weak one
Bring twelve months of data. We’ll break it into the four numbers, show you where each sits against what’s realistic in your category, and tell you which one deserves your next pound.
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References
Sources for grow ecommerce sales
The official documents and research this page is based on. Platform rules change, so check the source before you act on a detail.
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Last updated · Published by Zubair Afzal, responsible editor