How to make your ecommerce website high converting

Conversion Rate

Let's start with the obvious one. Your ecommerce conversion rate is the percentage of website visits that result in an order. If you have 10,000 website sessions and 100 orders, your conversion rate is approximately 1%. Simple.

But conversion rate should never be looked at in isolation. A luxury jewellery brand selling £2,000 necklaces shouldn't necessarily expect the same conversion rate as a brand selling £20 T-shirts. Traffic source matters. Product price matters. Country matters. New versus returning customers matters. Mobile versus desktop matters.

The important question isn't “Is my conversion rate good?” It is “Why aren't the other visitors buying?” That's the question that usually uncovers the real opportunities.

When I'm looking at an ecommerce store, I work backwards through the customer journey: Product viewed → Added to cart → Reached checkout → Purchased.

If lots of customers view products but very few add them to cart, there's probably a product page problem. If people add to cart but don't start checkout, look at the cart, shipping information and buying confidence. If plenty of shoppers reach checkout but don't purchase, investigate shipping costs, payment options, delivery expectations and checkout friction.

Don't guess. Follow the numbers.

Average Order Value

Increasing your conversion rate isn't the only way to make your website more profitable. Sometimes the fastest growth comes from increasing how much each customer spends. That's your Average Order Value, or AOV.

If your average customer currently spends £80 and you increase that to £100 without increasing your advertising spend, you've created a significant improvement in revenue from exactly the same traffic.

There are lots of ways to improve AOV without covering your website in aggressive upsells. Try:

• Product bundles
• Complete-the-look suggestions
• Complimentary products
• Free shipping thresholds
• Quantity incentives
• Gift wrapping
• Premium versions
• Relevant cart recommendations

The important word here is relevant. Your upsell should help the customer. It shouldn't feel like your website is desperately trying to squeeze another £20 out of them.

For jewellery brands, for example, recommending a matching chain, earring or bracelet can make complete sense. For fashion, it might be showing the customer the complete outfit. The best upsells feel like customer service.

Returning Customer Rate

A brand that constantly needs to acquire a completely new customer for every sale is going to have a difficult time growing profitably. That's why I pay a lot of attention to returning customer percentage.

The first purchase is only the beginning of the relationship. Once someone has bought from you, your job becomes getting them to come back. This is where email marketing becomes incredibly important.

Welcome flows are useful. Abandoned carts are useful. But post-purchase email is massively overlooked. What happens 7 days after somebody buys? 30 days later? 90 days later? When a complementary product launches? When their favourite collection gets something new? When an item they've saved comes back into stock?

For MATEO New York, for example, we don't just think about getting somebody to buy a piece of jewellery today. We're building the systems around the purchase as well: wishlist behaviour, post-purchase communication, new collections, segmentation and returning customer campaigns.

The website gets the first order. The ecosystem around it helps create the second, third and fourth.

Bounce Rate

One of my favourite exercises is opening a website and pretending I've never heard of the brand before. Give yourself five seconds. Can you answer: What do they sell? Why should I care? What should I click next? If you can't, your customer probably can't either.

Your homepage needs clarity before creativity. Beautiful imagery is fantastic. Beautiful imagery that leaves customers wondering what you actually sell isn't.

Your above-the-fold section should normally contain: a clear headline, a short explanation, a strong image or video, and a clear next action. You don't need twelve buttons. You don't need three popups. And you definitely don't need a homepage that takes 30 seconds to understand.

If someone lands on your website from Instagram, an advertisement or Google, the transition should feel completely natural. The promise that made them click should continue on the website.

Mobile UX & Speed

This is one of the biggest mistakes I still see. A brand builds its website on a laptop. The founder reviews it on a laptop. The designer sends screenshots from a laptop. The developer tests it on a laptop. Meanwhile, the customer is sitting on the sofa buying from an iPhone.

Your mobile website isn't a smaller version of your desktop website. For many ecommerce brands, it is the website. Every important page should be checked properly on mobile. Look at:

• Menu usability
• Image cropping
• Font size
• Product variants
• Add to Cart placement
• Sticky buttons
• Popups
• Reviews
• Product descriptions
• Cart drawers
• Checkout
• Payment buttons

Product imagery matters too

And then look at speed. Huge images, unnecessary apps, autoplaying video and excessive tracking scripts can slowly turn a beautiful Shopify store into a sluggish one. You don't need to remove everything. You need to decide whether each element is earning its place.

Speed shouldn't come at the cost of weak imagery. When somebody is shopping online, the image is effectively the product. With Rukhsana Jewellery, for example, we've put a lot of work into keeping product photography consistent, with clean backgrounds, controlled lighting, accurate scale and detailed close-ups.

That isn't simply a branding exercise. It removes uncertainty. The customer can properly see what they're buying. And confidence converts.

Checkout Completion

Getting someone into checkout is a big achievement. At this point they've discovered you, browsed, found a product, considered the price, selected their options, added it to their cart, and clicked checkout. Do not make buying difficult now.

Baymard Institute's ecommerce research continues to put average cart abandonment at around 70%, with issues including unexpected additional costs, forced account creation and overly complicated checkout processes contributing to abandonment. The closer somebody gets to purchasing, the less friction I want to introduce.

Make shipping expectations clear. Show delivery costs early where possible. Offer relevant payment methods. Allow guest checkout. Make discount fields straightforward. Don't surprise customers with taxes or duties at the final step.

We recently worked through exactly this issue with MATEO New York's international shopping experience. For UK customers, for example, import VAT can be payable on arrival. Rather than burying that information somewhere in a shipping policy, we can introduce it earlier in the buying journey.

That might sound like a small piece of copy. It isn't. It's expectation management. A surprise £200 charge at the end of a £1,000 purchase can kill the conversion. Clear information builds trust.

Refund & Return Rate

Most CRO articles stop when the customer completes checkout. I don't. A conversion isn't particularly valuable if the customer sends the product straight back. Your refund and return rate can expose problems elsewhere on the website.

High returns can indicate poor sizing information, misleading photography, incorrect colour representation, weak descriptions, unclear materials, confusing dimensions. Customers receive something different from what they expected.

That's why product information is part of conversion optimisation. Your goal isn't simply to persuade someone to place an order. Your goal is to help the right customer make the right purchase.

A slightly lower conversion rate with dramatically fewer returns can sometimes be far healthier for a business than chasing conversion at any cost.

Blended ROAS

Finally, I look at blended ROAS, or Return on Ad Spend. This is where all the previous work starts coming together.

Imagine spending £10,000 on marketing. You could try to make Meta find twice as much traffic. Or you could improve your conversion rate, your AOV, your returning customer rate, your email revenue and your checkout completion. Suddenly every pound you're already spending on advertising works harder.

This is why CRO and paid advertising shouldn't operate independently. A paid ads manager can send traffic. They cannot fix a confusing product page. They cannot fix bad photography. They cannot fix your shipping messaging. They cannot fix a clumsy cart. And they cannot make customers return six months later.

The website needs to do its part.

What does a high-converting ecommerce website actually look like?

There isn't one perfect Shopify theme. There isn't one magic homepage layout. And there definitely isn't one button colour that suddenly doubles sales.

A high-converting ecommerce website normally does something much simpler: it makes buying easy. Customers immediately understand the brand. Products are easy to discover. Photography answers questions. Product pages remove uncertainty. Shipping is clear. The cart creates confidence. Checkout is simple. The website works beautifully on mobile. And once somebody purchases, the relationship continues.

That's really what CRO is. It's removing little reasons not to buy.

Where I would start

If you're looking at your Shopify store wondering what to change first, don't redesign the entire website. Open your analytics. Start with the numbers. Look at:

• 1. Conversion Rate. Are enough visitors purchasing?
• 2. Average Order Value. How much does each customer spend?
• 3. Returning Customer %. Are customers coming back?
• 4. Bounce Rate. Are visitors leaving immediately?
• 5. Mobile UX & Speed. Can customers comfortably shop from their phone?
• 6. Checkout Completion. Where are buyers abandoning?
• 7. Refund / Return Rate. Are people happy with what arrives?
• 8. Blended ROAS. Is your total marketing spend producing profitable revenue?

That's my 8 Metric Method™. Instead of randomly changing things on your website, find the weakest part of the funnel first. Fix it. Measure it. Then move to the next one.

Because the goal isn't simply to build a better-looking website. The goal is to build a website that sells more of what you're already paying to put in front of people.