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If you want to grow your e-commerce business, start with one number. In e-commerce, on average 1 to 2 out of every 100 visitors convert into a paying customer. They buy a product, several products, an upsell, or go through a soft conversion that later still leads to a purchase. Conversion optimisation, or CRO, is carrying more and more weight in search, yet more than a third of business owners invest too little in it. Below are the small steps you can take yourself.
Your sales process should be a funnel. People land on your site, you capture a lead or an email address, they buy and ideally they come back for more. Look at the big online shops and one thing stands out: a huge database of returning customers. That is where their strength lies. Think of the structure of a sales conversation, poured into your page.
Say you take the lower limit of 1% conversion, 300 visitors a day and a product value of β¬50. That gives roughly β¬54,750 in revenue a year. Nudge that percentage towards a still modest 1.7% and your revenue grows to around β¬93,075. An increase of β¬38,325, practically free of extra fixed costs. That is how much difference a few tenths of a percentage point make.
A strong product page opens with a clear, sharp product photo on the left, your logo and a way to get in touch at the top. On the right, the product description, the price with a clear call to action and brand guarantees. Precisely those two, contact at the top and guarantees such as "in stock now" or "5-year guarantee", lift your conversion. They remove doubt at the moment it counts.
People want to see a product from every angle, front and back, zoomed in, worn, in a video or GIF. We take in images lightning fast, much faster than text, so invest in them generously. Do compress your images properly, because every extra second of loading time costs you conversion. A tool like PandaPng helps keep your images small and sharp.
Explain what your product is, how it is made and what story lies behind it. Translate features into benefits and combine logic with emotion, because one person buys on facts, another on feeling. Reach them both. Evoke emotion instead of naming it. "Life gets easier with this product" lands better than "Live enthusiastically with this product". Meanwhile, keep the logic digestible instead of burying the reader under it.
A handful of words gives your conversion a nudge. Think of free, now, guarantee, proven, popular, new and discount. There are hundreds of them. These give you an idea of the direction.
On your button, "Add to basket" beats variants such as "Put in shopping basket" or "Place in basket". "Buy" comes last, because people love buying, they just hate the feeling of being sold to. So stick to the familiar text. Better the devil you know.
Online, nobody can hold, smell or feel a product, so you get questions. Answer the most common ones in an FAQ and you save people time and remove doubt. It shows you have thought of every situation. That helps your conversion.
If someone is leaving your site, catch them with an exit-intent pop-up, for example via the free HelloBar. Offer a discount of 5, 10 or 20% in exchange for an email address, because coupons work well here. And the abandoned cart? According to the Baymard Institute, the average is 70.22%. Work out how much revenue is being left on the table there. The Baymard Institute sees an improvement of around 35% within reach through a smoother checkout and a smart follow-up email. Keep that follow-up personal and specific and strengthen it with a review or case study.
Reviews have become indispensable. Almost 88% of customers trust them as much as a tip from a friend and around 95% read them before buying. As many as 40% even switch to another brand based on reviews or unboxing videos. So collect as many as you can. Add a fitting sense of urgency, honest and free of pressure. If your stock is running low, show it. If stock is plentiful, promise next-day delivery for orders placed today, for example. Small nudges that speed up the decision.
A single tweak moves your revenue only a little. The gain lies in the sum of it all, from your ads and landing pages to your product pages, emails and upsells. Work through the whole funnel, keep fine-tuning and then you will really see your sales rise.
Since I wrote this, the playing field has shifted. Customers are increasingly asking an AI for buying advice. Since May 2025, Google has also answered many searches in the Netherlands with an AI Overview. At the end of 2025, more than 800 million people asked ChatGPT a question every week. More and more often, an answer like that determines which online shop a buyer even considers.
So make sure an AI understands your products and can recommend them with confidence. Describe each product in clear, human language, collect real reviews and keep your details consistent everywhere. Those are exactly the signals an answer engine reads to recommend you. And internally, AI helps you just as much: use it to speed up your product copy and make your offer more relevant per visitor, because relevance remains the engine behind your conversion.
More in this series on conversion
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About the author
Dominic Pietersz
Your dedicated point of contact
Dominic helps SMEs grow through Google and other channels. With his international experience, he turns challenges into concrete growth.
Follow Dominic on LinkedInInspiration Β· An online shop with plenty of visitors and few sales made my fingers itch. That evening I wrote these concrete steps to grow your e-commerce business.
