A discount feels free to give, and that is exactly why it is dangerous. It is a loan against your margin, and like any loan it gets repaid: in the margin you hand over, in the reference price you quietly reset, and in the customers…
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A gift card is two valuable things at once, and most stores treat it as neither. It is an interest-free advance, a customer paying you today for something you deliver later, and it is a customer-acquisition tool, because the person who redeems it is often…
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Almost every online store has an upsell. Almost none have a down-sell. We pour energy into getting customers to spend more, the upgrade, the add-on, the bundle, and we completely ignore the move that saves the sale when a customer is about to spend nothing.
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Raising the average order value, getting each customer who already chose to buy to spend a little more, is usually the fastest and cheapest way to grow an e-commerce business. You are not paying to acquire anyone or convince anyone, you are making more of…
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The moment right after someone buys from you is the single highest-trust, highest-goodwill moment you will ever get with that person. They have just said yes. They have handed over their card, their email, their address. Their guard is down and their momentum is forward.
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There is exactly one voice on your product page that a shopper trusts more than your own, and it is not yours. It is other customers. Everything you write about your product, however honest, carries an unavoidable discount in the reader's mind, because they know…
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The most absurd way to lose a customer is at the very last step, when someone has chosen the product, accepted the price, filled in their details, reached for their wallet, and then cannot pay the way they want to. Every other lost sale is…
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Site speed is not a separate conversion problem you can deal with later. It is a tax applied to every stage of your funnel at once, quietly shrinking the result of all the other work you do. A slow site loses people at discovery before…
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The moment a customer is about to type in their card number is the most anxious moment in the entire buying journey, and it is where a surprising number of otherwise-willing buyers quietly back out. Around a fifth of shoppers have abandoned a purchase specifically…
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Two of the most damaging things you can do at checkout are entirely self-inflicted, and they come from the same mistake: putting your convenience ahead of the customer's. The first is forcing people to create an account before they can buy. The second is making…
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The product page is where the buying decision actually gets made, which makes it the most important page on your store, and the one most stores treat as an afterthought. Everything before it, the ads, the homepage, the category listings, only does one job: deliver…
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The customers you lose at checkout are the most expensive customers you will ever lose, because they are the ones who already decided to buy. They wanted your product. They picked it, added it to the cart, and walked all the way to the payment…
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Most online stores spend almost all their energy trying to get more people to show up, and almost none on the fact that the overwhelming majority of the people who already showed up leave without buying. This is backwards. You have, sitting in your analytics…
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