Growing an e-commerce business is a complex process that heavily relies on trial and error.
With the current consumer sentiment being on the downturn and buyers’ CX expectations rapidly rising, identifying and implementing effective growth tactics ideal for your brand can be challenging.
But the simple truth is that investing in e-commerce site optimization has tremendous potential, especially if you focus on metrics that deliver impressive ROI.
So, when looking to scale your business in a way that is both profitable and sustainable, your best bet is to direct your efforts toward enhancing high-value KPIs that have the most direct impact on revenue performance.
Are you looking to optimize the metrics that drive e-commerce growth? Here’s how orienting your strategy around conversion, average order value, and cart abandonment can help you reach your goals. Let’s get into it.
Conversion
According to research, the median conversion rate for e-commerce businesses in 2024 was 4.2%. And even though this number is higher than what is considered a “good” CR for digital sellers (usually somewhere between 2.5% and 4%), it’s still not sufficient for real growth.
In fact, it could be argued that the slight elevation in median conversion rates simply comes down to the growing popularity of online shopping, with over 23% of all global retail sales coming from digital sales channels.
So, while your target audience may be more open to the idea of shopping online, which will automatically boost business, accomplishing conversion rates that can grow your business takes much more than waiting for shoppers to feel comfortable with buying through your website.
For this reason, it’s crucial to optimize your e-commerce store in a way that will engage leads and effectively nurture them into returning customers of your brand.
Here are three optimization tactics to help you accomplish this goal.
Make Use of Product Videos
One of the easiest methods to elevate your e-commerce website’s conversion potential is to incorporate videos into your product pages.
The reason for this is simple. Video is one of the most effective content formats for engaging consumers in digital settings. More importantly, it’s also people’s preferred way to evaluate solutions, with 78% of consumers saying the ideal way to learn about a product or service is to watch a short video.
However, here’s the deal about effectively using product videos to optimize conversion rates and drive growth: doing the basics is no longer enough.
As consumers’ expectations of brands grow, you need to keep up with their demands and provide extensive product information that demonstrates your solutions have genuine potential to address customer pain points. For this reason, using videos that address the more granular aspects and capabilities of your solutions could be an effective way to show your target audience they’re the right choice.
Take a look at how Sewing Parts Online achieves this with its product page media. Instead of just using one short video to summarize product features, this brand creates separate videos and imagery for every unique product characteristic. This helps web visitors grasp the benefits each solution offers. And it makes them much more likely to convert once they’ve discovered an option that meets all their needs.
Source: sewingpartsonline.com
Offer Subscription Purchasing
Getting a web visitor to click the ‘buy’ button once is a great success. But the long-term potential of a single sale is nowhere near that of turning a first-time buyer into a repeat customer of your business.
If you consult the research on marketing ROI, you’ll find that customer acquisition is far more costly than retention. In fact, data from the Harvard Business Review suggests that converting a new customer costs anywhere from five to 25 times more than retaining an existing client, demonstrating the importance of loyalty in business growth.
But here’s the deal: brand loyalty is declining due to a variety of factors (including economic uncertainty). And this means that convincing your target audience to purchase from your brand repeatedly requires that you offer something they really want in return.
One such consumer benefit, which could help generate recurring revenue, includes adopting the subscription model.
According to research, subscription purchases are consistently growing in popularity. And the reason for this is simple: they make consumers’ lives easier. In fact, a new survey discovered that 8 in 10 Gen Z and Millennials agree that subscription services are convenient because they save time. And 83% of US parents choose this method of shopping due to the same reason.
So, if you want to optimize conversions in a way that will drive e-commerce growth, consider making repeat purchases a logical and practical way for your prospects to solve their pain points.
For example, Performance Lab assigns its ‘Smart Subscription’ offer as the default option on product pages. Then, to ensure customers comprehend the benefits of loyalty, it highlights that this model provides an impressive 25% savings, free shipping, and full flexibility to align with ever-changing consumer requirements.
Source: performancelab.com
Highlight Impactful Trust Signals
Finally, as you explore methods to boost conversion rates, don’t forget about the importance of brand trust in influencing consumer purchase decisions.
According to some of the latest data, brand trustworthiness is now as important as product quality and value for money to 88% of consumers. Optimizing your e-commerce webpages for consumer confidence thus holds the potential to pay off both in the short and long run.
Enriching your website with trust badges and social proof is an exceptional method to remove common conversion obstacles and convince first-time buyers to give your brand and products a chance.
The product pages on the Rains site do this quite well. Despite using only a few curated trust signals—an average star rating and messages promising a 2-year product warranty and 30-day free returns—these webpage elements are more than enough to remove consumers’ most common fears and gently guide them toward a positive conversion decision.
Source: rains.com
Average Order Value
Another metric you can optimize to drive e-commerce growth is average order value.
After all, we’ve already mentioned that converting any new customer requires a certain investment in marketing. So, to offset that cost (and create a healthy cash flow that’ll allow you to further promote your products), you could explore ways to get your buyers to spend more when shopping with your brand.
Additionally, boosting AOV isn’t just an effective method to maximize customer lifetime value and marketing ROI. It’s also a great strategy for boosting the value customers receive from their purchases, positively affecting their perception of your business and acting as an important stepping stone toward earning their loyalty.
Here are three optimization tactics you can implement to elevate ecommerce AOV.
Make Product Customization Easy
One of the most prevalent consumer demands in 2025 has to do with personalization.
According to research by McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect brands to provide personalized experiences, and 76% become frustrated when this doesn’t happen. But the thing is, buyers don’t just demand that brands cater to their unique needs. Their patience for non-tailored marketing messages is diminishing as well, with 81% of people ignoring irrelevant marketing messages and one-quarter being less likely to convert after receiving a generic marketing message.
With this in mind, one of the best methods to set up your e-commerce website for long-term business growth is to make it exceptionally easy for your audience to get precisely what they want.
Making product customization easy is a simple method to optimize the AOV metric. For instance, check out how EXT Cabinets does it. This brand shows all product add-ons on product pages. And this doesn’t just make it clear to web visitors that the brand has what they need in its offer. Selecting these complementary products/features is also straightforward, allowing shoppers to customize their purchases while boosting AOV for the brand.
Source: extcabinets.com
Easy, Intuitive Cross-Selling Mechanics
We’ve already mentioned that, in 2025, most consumers are value and cost-conscious. In fact, Deloitte’s research suggests that 4 in 10 people fall into the category of value-seeking shoppers who are willing to sacrifice comfort and convenience for the sake of saving money.
But here’s the thing. The trend of value-prioritization doesn’t mean that your capacity to boost AOV is diminished. Instead, it just indicates that getting prospects to buy more necessitates a stronger alignment between what they seek and what you offer.
According to Retail Dive, 40% of consumers don’t associate value with price. And brands that are capable of providing their customers with what they seek (in terms of that value) consistently witness higher rates of purchase intent and lower price sensitivity.
So, if you’re looking to drive ecommerce growth through boosting AOV, consider opportunities to create shopping experiences that give your customers more bang for their buck.
Intuitive and meaningful cross-selling, for instance, helps shoppers manage shopping experiences in ways that provide sought-after benefits without significantly increasing costs.
Check out how Wool & Oak does it in its e-commerce store. By including a simple cross-selling mechanism in the Cart popup, this business invites shoppers to “complete” their purchases with relevant accessories, knowing that its target audience of luxury-seeking travellers will appreciate the improvement in overall customer experience provided by the additional products.
Source: woolandoak.com
Offer Product Bundles with Clear Savings
Alternatively, if you know that price sensitivity is a thing for your target audience, present web visitors with opportunities to get more for less by investing in pre-designed product sets.
Product bundles that clearly emphasize savings, like the Intro Routine for Glowing Skin from The Inkey List that advertises 30% savings, are excellent incentives for getting new customers to spend more in your store while still making them feel like they’re receiving more value than they’re actually paying.
Source: theinkeylist.com
Cart Abandonment
Finally, if you’re truly committed to growing your ecommerce business through key metric optimization, you must address cart abandonment.
On average, 70.22% of all people who add items to their carts fail to convert into customers.
Naturally, the reasons for this behaviour vary (lack of cost transparency, slow delivery, and lack of brand trust being some of the most prominent reasons for cart abandonment).
Nevertheless, addressing this growth obstacle could be an exceptionally effective way to boost your company’s long-term potential and increase your revenue, providing cash flow to adopt additional growth strategies.
So, what are some of the best tactics for lowering cart abandonment rates? The following three are excellent places to start.
Make Stock and Delivery Conditions Transparent
For many consumers, convenience plays a huge role in determining their buying decisions.
According to research from 2025, 77% of shoppers would choose to buy from a brand if it meant more comfort, speed, and better availability.
Obviously, the state of your stock makes up a significant part of a convenient customer experience.
So, if you’re looking to remove conversion obstacles that cause cart abandonment and encourage your target audience to choose your business, try adding a dose of clarity to the availability of your products.
By prioritizing transparency regarding stock and delivery times early on in the buyer’s journey, you can make it super easy for potential customers to choose your brand’s solutions due to their convenience.
For instance, check out how Icecartel achieves this on its product pages. The brand uses design to attract shoppers’ attention to the fact that a piece is ready to ship. It also promises that buyers receive their items in just four days. Moreover, knowing how important availability and shipping speed are to its buyers, this brand includes a “Ready to Ship” CTA at the top of its header, using the element to encourage buyers to move to the final stage of the sales funnel sooner rather than later.
Source: icecartel.com
Allow Guest Checkout
Sometimes, consumers aren’t failing to go through with purchases due to a lack of trust or convenience. Instead, they’re simply looking for a fast and easy way to resolve their pain points.
So, if your store requires account creation for people to buy, that might be a reason why your cart abandonment rates are high.
If you want to optimize metrics that will facilitate effortless e-commerce business growth, one tactic you should consider is to allow guest checkout in your online store.
By incorporating express checkout options into your cart, like they did for Lulu and Georgia, you can make it super easy for your audience to get what they need and prevent them from perceiving buying from your business as tedious or inconvenient due to a complex checkout process.
Source: luluandgeorgia.com
Use Exit-Intent Popups
Finally, when optimizing cart abandonment metrics, keep in mind that some shoppers don’t go through with a purchase just because.
The reason for their failure to convert isn’t a lack of trust or convenience. It’s simply that the value you offer isn’t sufficient to convince them to finalize the transaction at the stage of the buyer’s journey they currently populate.
So, if you want to get more of these web visitors to convert into customers (and shorten the sales cycle, use exit-intent popups to present shoppers with offers they won’t want to miss.
For example, the Bay Alarm Medical website features such an element that uses urgency and offers 40% off to incentivize shoppers to convert sooner rather than later. It’s a low-cost strategy. Yet, it’s worth trying out, especially if you’re seeing high cart abandonment rates that are stopping you from making the most of your site’s conversion potential.
Source: bayalarmmedical.com
Final Thoughts
Conversion rates, average order value, and cart abandonment are all metrics you can optimize to facilitate e-commerce business growth. And the great thing is that even small tweaks can generate impressive ROI.
So, don’t hesitate to try out the tactics discussed in this guide. They’re all widely applicable and easily adaptable to perfectly align with your branding and marketing strategies (and your target audience’s preferences). In other words, there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain. Take the chance and see if you can unlock more revenue that’ll secure the future of your business.
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