E-commerce · Shopify
Where to look, in order: traffic quality, product pages, shipping costs, checkout, email flows and repeat customers. With a worked example of what a small lift is worth.
Conversion before traffic
Show shipping costs early
Three emails that pay for themselves
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When a Shopify store’s sales are flat, the instinct is to buy more traffic: more ads, more influencers, more posts. Usually that is the second thing to do. The first is to get more of the people already visiting to buy, because every improvement there also makes every future visitor worth more. Look in this order: where the traffic comes from, the product pages, shipping costs, the checkout, your email flows, and what brings customers back a second time.
That is my opinion, and the arithmetic backs it up. Doubling traffic usually means doubling the ad budget. Lifting the conversion rate by a third often means fixing a few pages and one shipping rule.
Take an illustrative store with 8,000 sessions a month, a 1.2 percent conversion rate and a $70 average order. That is 96 orders and $6,720 in monthly revenue.
Option one: buy 33 percent more traffic. If those extra 2,640 sessions convert at the same rate, you get about 32 more orders, minus whatever the extra traffic cost you to buy.
Option two: lift conversion from 1.2 to 1.6 percent on the traffic you already have. That is 128 orders and $8,960 a month, the same gain, with no extra spend on media. And when you do buy more traffic later, it converts at 1.6 percent instead of 1.2.
Your numbers will differ. The point is to run them before deciding where the next dollar goes. Shopify’s analytics shows sessions, conversion rate and average order value on the main dashboard, so this takes ten minutes.
Before touching the store, open the sessions report by channel and look at conversion rate per source. It is common to find one channel converting well (email, organic search, returning visitors) and another sending lots of visitors who leave in seconds (a broad social campaign, an app that drives cheap clicks). Low-quality traffic drags down the average and hides how well the store really works for the right people. Cutting the worst source can lower traffic and raise sales at the same time, which is rather satisfying.
Sort products by sessions, take the top ten, and read each page on your phone as if you had never heard of the brand. Most stores I look at have the same gaps: photos that don’t show scale or the product in use, a description written for the founder rather than the buyer, no answer to the obvious question (Will it fit? How long does it last? What is it made of?), and reviews hidden below the fold or missing.
Put the price, the shipping cost or threshold, and the return policy near the add-to-cart button. Shoppers who have to hunt for those leave to find them somewhere else and often don’t come back. Our guide to e-commerce product pages goes further on what to include.
Baymard Institute’s research (last updated in September 2025) puts the average documented online cart abandonment rate at 70.22 percent, and the single most common reason shoppers give during checkout is that extra costs (shipping, tax, fees) were too high, cited by 40 percent of those who were not just browsing. Surprise shipping at the last step is the classic version of this.
You don’t have to offer free shipping on everything. But you do have to show the cost early, and it is worth testing a free-shipping threshold set just above your current average order. On the example store, a threshold at $85 gives a $70 basket a reason to add one more item. Build the shipping cost into the threshold and the margin usually holds.
A good checkout is one nobody remembers. Turn on accelerated options such as Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay, allow guest checkout, cut any extra fields you added, and remove apps that inject pop-ups at the last step. Then place a real test order on your own phone, on mobile data, and time it. If it takes you more than a minute and you know the store, it takes your customers longer.
Speed matters here too. Every app you install adds scripts, and many stores carry apps they stopped using a year ago. Our Shopify speed optimization guide covers how to find them.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on your store, book a free 30-minute call. We will look at your traffic, product pages and checkout and tell you what we would change first. Book your free call.
If your store sends only campaigns, you are missing the emails that make money while you sleep. Shopify’s own automations, Klaviyo and similar tools can all send these. In order of value for most small stores:
Repeat customers are the quiet engine of most profitable stores. Check what share of your orders come from returning customers. If it is low, think about what would naturally bring someone back: a refill, a seasonal product, an accessory, a replenishment reminder timed to when the first one runs out. My view is that a store that earns a second order from a meaningful share of first-time buyers can afford to pay more for traffic than its competitors, and that is when buying more visitors finally makes sense.
When the store converts well and customers come back, then spend on traffic. Our web design and e-commerce team builds and improves Shopify, Shopify Plus and other platforms, and we would rather fix the store before you pay for more visitors to it.
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It varies a lot by product, price and traffic source, so compare your store against itself. Look at conversion rate by channel and by product, and work on the pages with the most traffic first.
Not necessarily on everything. Show the shipping cost early and test a free-shipping threshold just above your average order, with the cost built into the threshold so the margin holds.
Usually fewer. Each app adds scripts that can slow the store down. Remove the apps you don’t use, then add one at a time and measure the effect.
Once the store converts well and customers come back for second orders. At that point each visitor is worth more, so you can afford to pay more for traffic.
