A Guide to Ecommerce Optimization: Tips, Examples, & Tools

In this post, we're exploring ecommerce optimization strategies for your long-term success.

If you want to improve your website's conversion rate, you'll find tips, strategies, tools, and case studies to help optimize your store and increase revenue.

Get started:

• Ecommerce optimization definition

• A balanced approach to ecommerce website optimization

• Key areas for online store optimization

• Tips for optimizing an online store

What is ecommerce optimization?

Ecommerce optimization is an ongoing process of improving the design, onsite marketing strategies, navigation, and conversion funnel of an ecommerce website to improve the shopping experience and increase customer engagement, conversion rate, and sales. 

Online store optimization includes personalization, SEO, content marketing, website design, email marketing, social media marketing, customer review marketing, loyalty programs, engagement analytics, A/B testing, and customer service. Finding areas for optimization and tracking the impact of changes requires analytics and reporting provided by onsite marketing and conversion rate optimization software.

A balanced approach to optimizing an ecommerce website

Conversion rate is an excellent way to judge how well your ecommerce store is optimized, but it can easily be misunderstood or misused.

For example, it’s often used as a one-size-fits-all metric, but that doesn’t really work when you’re trying to measure the success of different marketing projects like sales or email signups.

Let me illustrate.

In the first scenario, the high conversion rate (5%) might suggest success (since the average rate is around 2%). But if we look at the second scenario, we see that the same number of visitors and even fewer orders could bring a higher average value, driving more revenues.

Ecommerce website optimization: key areas

Ecommerce optimization tips

• Boost visitor engagement with onsite notifications

• Share viewed and related products in AI-powered feed

• Personalize shopping experience with targeted onsite campaigns

• Focus on loyal customers with account-based campaigns

• Help with choosing products with a quiz

• Gamify email list building and shopping experience

• Use time-limited offers to increase urgency

• Find underoptimized elements with CRO tools

• Experiment with different cart recovery channels

• Implement ecommerce SEO techniques

• Offer checkout after customers add an item to the cart

• Encourage product exploration with thumbnails

• Remove distractions from your homepage

• Bring organic traffic with original content

• Run A/B tests for insights

• Get customer feedback

Boost visitor engagement with onsite notifications

Onsite notifications are a subtle, social media-inspired feature designed to enhance websites by offering personalized shopping experiences. Displayed as a bell icon in the website header, this non-intrusive feed shows the number of unread messages, making it an effective tool for promoting products in a user-friendly way.

One of the key benefits of onsite notifications is their accessibility from any page, eliminating the need for website modifications when promoting products.

Example: here’s the "bell" with one unread message on CODAGE Paris:

If a visitor clicks the bell, they see a feed with marketing messages. They are pre-made by CODAGE’s marketing team and can be personalized based on browsing history, cart content, and account status.

The feed offers many ways to discover products, including links to new arrivals, a newsletter signup form, and an advent calendar promotion:

To personalize notifications for every visitor or visitor group, ecommerce businesses use targeting. 

A must in ecommerce marketing, targeting options vary from one tool to another. In the case of onsite notifications, you’ll be able to create campaigns based on the browsing history, location, device, UTM, cart content, frequency of orders, and more:

Steps to optimize your store

To use onsite notifications, you need an app. Wisepops is the only platform with this unique feature that you can try for free (works with all ecommerce platforms).

To get started:

• Add onsite notifications to your store 

• Create campaigns (here are 10 campaign ideas and examples from ecommerce)

• Launch notifications, experiment, and monitor performance

Share viewed and related products in a AI-powered feed

If you're already using a recommendation tool to showcase related items on product pages, you might be relying on rule-based systems. These tools often don’t leverage real-time data, limiting your ability to deliver personalized shopping experiences.

One way to optimize your ecommerce website in this area is to use AI automation. It can generate personalized recommendations using data like browsing activity and sales performance of the items in your store.

AI Wishlist is a good example of shop optimization.

AI Wishlist makes visited items accessible from any page on a website, ensuring they stay front and center. Even if a visitor leaves the website and comes back later, their list will be right there, ready and waiting.

Example: a fashion store émoi émoi achieved an 11.4% order rate through clicks on items recommended by AI-powered wishlist. 

Steps to optimize your store

• Add an AI-powered wishlist or product recommendation tool to your website

• Set up revenue tracking to assess the impact

• Check performance after a while (views, click rate, revenue)

Personalize shopping experience with targeted onsite campaigns

Onsite campaigns (website popups, embedded forms, sticky bars, etc.) are practically the same in most ecommerce stores. For example, every visitor is blasted with the same popup asking to sign up for the newsletter. 

That’s a missed opportunity.

An average popup converts around 3% of visitors but a personalized one can hit a 21.57% mark. As with many other online store optimization techniques, targeting is key here.

With targeting, you can make campaigns tailored to: 

• The product category that a visitor viewed during one visit

• The number of items in a customer’s shopping cart 

• The total value of products in a customer’s cart 

• The time since a customer’s last purchase 

• Visitor source (organic, paid, email campaign, etc.)

Example: 

This campaign on Syos appears only if a customer visits a few products but adds nothing to the cart. Since saxophone and clarinet mouthpieces are something that many people need help with choosing, this message can be very helpful for visitors:

Steps to optimize your store

• Get an onsite marketing app if you don’t already have one

• Create campaigns that target specific visitor groups (new, returning, paid, frequent shoppers, etc.) using targeting 

• Get campaign ideas: how to use onsite marketing for the entire customer journey

Focus on loyal customers with account-based campaigns

One way to optimize your ecommerce store’s conversions is to double down on your repeat customers to drive the average order value and revenue per customer.

Use your customer data to create personalized campaigns specifically for loyal customers. They are your best bet to increase ecommerce sales and can help you by spreading the word about your business, too.

Example, Notiq gave a $20 discount to their repeat customers in this email:

Steps to optimize your store

• Create exclusive deals and loyalty bonuses for repeat customers

• Use email and onsite campaigns to share them

• Assess performance (for example, by tracking discount code application)

Help with choosing products with a quiz

If you sell something that your visitors might also need some assistance with choosing, this ecommerce optimization idea could help improve conversions. About 19% of Shopify stores have product quizzes, especially those selling cosmetics, coffee, gifts, and other products that require personalization.

Example: Blume’s skin quiz is a good way to find products for a personalized skincare routine:

Steps to optimize your store

• Get a quiz app for your website (Typeform, Jotform, and SurveyMonkey are popular options; check these list building tools for more info)

• Embed a quiz into a separate web page or a popup form (here’s how to embed a Typeform or SurveyMonkey quiz in a popup) 

• Promote your quiz in email campaigns, website banners, and social media

Gamify email list building and shopping experience

Gamified onsite campaigns are a fun way to grab attention and engage visitors (think spin wheels, scratch cards, or surprise offers). In fact, spin-to-win popups convert visitors three times better than regular campaigns when used for special occasions. 

Here are a few ideas to try: 

• Spin-to-win wheels with discounts or other offers

• Easter egg hunts for hidden deals 

• Digital scratch cards with mystery bonuses 

Example: OddBalls had this gorgeous campaign for Christmas:

Steps to optimize your store

• Decide on the goal (boost engagement, grow email list, etc.)

• Create a gamified campaign (a spin-to-win wheel would be the easiest one), ideally for a special occasion like the holiday season

• Run the campaign for a limited time on your website

Use time-limited offers to increase urgency

Urgency is a powerful tactic to improve your sales from both new and existing customers. Time-limited offers can take many forms, such as flash sales, countdown timers on product pages and in onsite campaigns, or limited editions of products.

Example: Charlotte Bio, a cosmetics store that does sales only a few times a year, made 17% of monthly revenues with a six-hour-long flash sale:

“The campaign did not affect the average shopping cart value, as the customers bought more than usual.”

Marilou Bertrand, Director of Digital Marketing, Charlotte Bio

Steps to optimize your store

• Choose a time-limited offer (BOGO, daily deal, seasonal clearance, flash sale, product bundle, etc.): see more limited-time offer examples

• Promote the offer in our emails, popups, paid ads, and website banners

• Monitor sales to evaluate performance and optimize your next offer

Find underoptimized elements with CRO tools

Almost any underperforming page, onsite campaign, or page element can be improved. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools are often the most effective way because they give you the insights and data needed to understand what changes should be made.

Here are some simple examples:

Steps to optimize your store

Consider these software for common optimization needs on ecommerce websites:

• Write better product descriptions, optimize meta data for SEO: AI tools for ecommerce

• Increase sales by recommending related items: product recommendation software

• Create onsite campaigns that convert more visitors: email capture software

Or—

If you’re unsure where to start, here are 15 ideas for A/B testing in ecommerce.

Experiment with different cart recovery channels

Emails are perhaps the most common channel for recovering abandoned carts, but not the only one out there. 

You can also try other options, such as:

• Exit-intent popups with a discount or reminder message

• Onsite notifications with extra bonuses

• Push notifications with reminders

• SMS messages with personalized offers

Example:

OddBalls gives an extra 10% off to visitors with items in the cart with an exit campaign:

Pura Vida sends reminders via push notifications:

Dolce & Gabbana shows this simple reminder on the cart page, along with a link to customer support in case some help is needed:

Steps to optimize your store

• See how other businesses recover carts: examples of push notifications; cart recovery popup examples

• Choose your channels and get software to get started: top popup software, abandoned cart apps for Shopify

• See how to use discounts while protecting your profits: ecommerce discount strategy tips

Implement ecommerce SEO techniques

Optimizing your store is a must-do ecommerce optimization strategy to attract more customers from search engines. You don’t have to be an expert to get started (although you may need one at some point later)—there are plenty of software that automates SEO processes.

Some of the essential ecommerce SEO aspects include:

Steps to optimize your store

• Do keyword research. Find relevant keywords for your products, categories, and content using tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs.

• Optimize pages. Add clear titles, descriptions, and image alt text incorporating target keywords to product pages, category pages, menu pages, etc.

• Create content for potential customers. Write articles that address the most common problems and needs of your customers as well as how your products might help address them (more about this point in the next section)

Bring organic traffic with original content

Blogging is a major step towards driving qualified leads from search engines. Create how-to articles, instructional videos, buying guides, product comparisons, and videos to showcase your product range and attract qualified visitors to your store.

KitchenAid has an awesome blog with detailed instructions, quality visuals, and helpful tips for readers. Definitely check it out for inspiration: KitchenAid blog.

Here’s an example of how the content team at KitchenAid mentions their products (the post is called “How to make pizza dough”):

Steps to optimize your store

Follow these steps to begin:

• Keyword research. Do keyword research with tools like Google Search Console (free) or Ahrefs free WebMaster tools to ensure that our content has a good chance to grab visitors

• Content topics. Create a content plan (selection of topics and topic categories that address your customers’ needs and challenges)—use your knowledge of your customers, get inspired by competitors’ blogs, or use an AI tool like Chatgpt

• Content creation. Make content and enrich it with videos and high-quality images (especially for instructional posts like “How to make espresso”) 

• Product mentions. Add links to your product pages where appropriate to show how they can help with specific challenges

• Content promotion. Share your content on social media, emails, and other marketing channels you have access to

Offer checkout after customers add an item to the cart

It’s easy to think that redirecting customers to checkout after they add an item to the cart is a bad idea. Have them browse some more, right? 

If your store offers fewer than 50 products, it might not provide enough variety to keep visitors engaged and browsing like they would on larger platforms such as Amazon.

So, there’s a good chance that they would become distracted or busy and simply abandon their cart. To avoid using retargeting ads or extra discounts, consider experimenting with prompting customers to go to the checkout page immediately after they add something to the cart.

Example:

Nickey Kehoe, a furniture store, redirected me to the cart page with a checkout button after I added one item to the cart:

Steps to optimize your store

• Implement a cart addition confirmation sidebar with a link to the checkout page or immediate redirect to the cart page

• Consider adding upsells, recommended items, and other marketing messages to the checkout to increase the average order value

Encourage product exploration with extra thumbnails 

Research shows that up to 65% of shoppers focus on thumbnails more than anything else when browsing category pages.

So, try experimenting with different ways to showcase products on your category pages to optimize your store. Static images are still a common approach, but they might not be the best option since they don’t always provide enough details for visitors to decide if a product is worth checking out.

One simple optimization tip is to add extra thumbnails to show how products look in use:

Steps to optimize your store

• Prepare product images (consider lifestyle photography to give customers more information about whether a product is worth considering before they even visit its page)

• Add the extra thumbnails to menu and/or product category pages and test the impact using heatmaps and visitor recordings

Remove distractions from your homepage

In one ecommerce study, online shoppers found that 52% of stores had too many distractions or even aggressive messages on homepages. That affected the first impression, affected the ability to find the right products, and convinced many to leave. 

One way to optimize an ecommerce store's homepage to avoid such outcomes is to remove most distractions. You can, for example, focus our homepage on a single marketing message you'd like to prioritize. 

Example: Asphalte, a clothing store, focuses on one product. And it does so beautifully thanks to the minimalistic and aesthetically pleasing design:

Steps to optimize your store

• Use a hero image with one product

• Have only one CTA button above the fold

Get inspiration: 30 examples of great ecommerce website design

Run A/B tests for insights

A/B testing in ecommerce involves comparing two versions of a webpage or onsite campaign against each other, so you can identify which one performs better and make the necessary changes for improvement.

Consider these essential test ideas:

Example:

Asphalte aimed to improve lead generation and experimented with the design of popup forms. After trying different formats (traditional vs full-screen popup), images, and copy, they were able to increase the CTR from 15% to 25%.

Find out more in this guide to A/B testing for popups.

Steps to optimize your store

• Define the store elements that may need to be improved

• Create hypotheses, expected outcomes, and two campaign versions

• Run the test and compare results

• Get more test ideas and examples in this guide to A/B testing for conversion rate optimization

Get customer feedback

One one customer review or filled out survey can give you some tips on how to optimize your online store. Make collecting customer feedback an ongoing process by sending email surveys and running onsite surveys regularly.

Here are some ways to gather customer feedback:

• Surveys or polls on product pages

• Email surveys after a purchase

• Social media polls or questionnaires

• Customer service surveys

• Popup surveys

Example: Neom Cosmetics uses an onsite survey to gather feedback from their visitors:

Steps to optimize your store

• Choose channels to collect feedback (email, popup forms, Google forms, etc.)

• Create surveys focusing on specific issues (“what’s stopping you from buying?”, “How would you rate the shopping experience?”)

• Consider using software like Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, Yotpo, and customer feedback messages in your email marketing software for automation

Summary

Ecommerce optimization is an ongoing process and there will always be room for improvement. Continuously evaluate your store's performance, gather feedback from customers, and try out new strategies to stay ahead of the competition. 

Consider these resources if you’d like to learn more about ecommerce growth:

• Examples of lead generation forms

• Guide to developing a Shopify marketing strategy

• A beginner’s guide to using product recommendations