How To Turn Clicks Into Customers

Most online stores are losing money at specific points in the customer journey, but they don’t know where. Traffic comes in, sales trickle out, and the gap in between is a black box.

An ecommerce funnel shows you exactly where you’re bleeding revenue. Once you can see it, you can fix it.

What Is an Ecommerce Funnel?

An ecommerce funnel tracks how people move from discovering your store to making a purchase.

It’s a simplified visual model that shows how potential customers become actual customers.

The ecommerce funnel is broken down into a series of stages: Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Conversion, and Loyalty.

Think of these stages as broadly capturing where website visitors are in process of becoming paying customers:

Awareness: Strangers find out your brand exists
Interest: Visitors learn how you can help them
Consideration: Shoppers compare your offer to others
Conversion: Buyers decide to purchase your product
Loyalty: Customers return and tell their friends

Of course real customer behavior doesn’t proceed in a straight line. People don’t see one ad, click through your site, browse, buy, and join your loyalty program in a single sitting.

No, the typical customer journey is chaotic.

People bounce around. They compare prices. They get distracted. They forget about you and remember you later. They see your brand mentioned five times before they’re ready to click.

The purpose of an ecommerce funnel is to simplify this messy reality into clear stages you can improve. It’s not a perfect representation of every customer journey, rather it’s a useful tool to help you identify where you’re losing potential sales.

Some people will never convert, and that’s fine. The goal of using a funnel is to identify where your sales process breaks down and ends up driving away people who really do want to buy.

You’ll be able to find out what’s getting in the way of potential buyers, and remove those barriers one by one.

Increasing funnel conversion rates

Before you can improve your funnel, you need to understand your conversion rate. This is the single most important metric for measuring funnel performance because it tells you how well your entire system is working.

The conversion rate compares the number of people who visited your store to the number of people who actually made a purchase. Here’s the equation:

Ecommerce conversion rate = (sales / website visits) x 100

So if 1,000 people visited your store this month and you had 45 sales, you would have a conversion rate of 4.5%.

That’s a pretty good conversion rate. The average Shopify store converts at 1.4%, according to a survey by LittleData, a Shopify analytics app.

For your average store, that means 98-99 out of 100 visitors leave without buying.

Yikes!

But think about this. According to that same survey of Shopify data, the top 10 percent of stores had a conversion rate of 4.7% or higher. That means that some of the top performing stores are still watching 95 out of every 100 visitors leave without buying.

My point is you can have an incredibly profitable store by increasing your conversion rates by a small amount.

Example: how a funnel helps you find high-value fixes

The funnel helps you see where things break down. The overall conversion rate is critical, but with a funnel, you can look at the microconversions for each stage that show where people drop off along the way.

Here’s a simple model that tracks the drop off from one stage to the next:

Awareness to Interest: 1,000 ad impressions → 100 site visits (10% CTR)
Interest to Consideration: 100 visits → 40 engaged browsers (40% engagement)
Consideration to Conversion: 40 engaged → 25 add to cart (62.5% ATC rate)
Cart to Purchase: 25 carts → 10 purchases (60% abandonment)

That’s 10 sales out of 1,000 people who saw your ad. A 1% conversion rate, a little weaker than the average.

But notice where this funnel lost serious potential buyers. The killer drop is the shopping cart abandonment, where 25 people added products to their cart, and then 15 bailed on the final step.

Tragic.

If we could fix that and get even half of those 15 people to complete checkout, we’d jump to 17-18 customers. That’s nearly a 2% conversion rate, which would almost double your revenue from the same ad spend. Much healthier.

This is why the funnel matters. It takes your overall conversion rate and breaks it into pieces you can actually fix.

The 5 Stages of an Ecommerce Funnel

In the sections that follow, we’ll walk through each stage, the key website metrics to track, and tactics you can use to make improvements.

Think of this as a framework, not an exact formula. Your specific funnel will look different depending on your product, price point, and customer behavior.

A brand making money off $20 impulse buys, for example, is going to have a different funnel design than one that sells $2,000 products.

The metrics that matter most at each stage will vary based on your business model. So use what’s relevant for your store and adapt the rest.

Stage 1: Awareness – Getting on your customer’s radar

The awareness stage is where potential customers first discover your brand exists. They might have a problem to solve or a need to fill, but they don’t know about your store yet. Your job at this stage is to show up where your target market is already looking.

This is the widest part of your funnel, and you’re casting a broad net to attract as many relevant eyeballs as possible. Relevant is the key word here.

Many brands burn money raising brand awareness because they max out reach at the expense of relevance. They focus on audience size instead of audience fit, and wind up paying for clicks by people who will never buy.

Key awareness metrics

Traffic volume: Total number of visitors coming to your site
Click-through rate (CTR): Percentage of people who see your ad and click through to your site.
Cost per click (CPC): How much you’re paying to get someone to your site through paid channels
Brand search volume: How many people are searching for your brand name

You’ll also see metrics like impressions, reach, and share of voice thrown around in awareness discussions. These can be helpful, but more often they’re vanity metrics with little real business impact. You can rack up millions of impressions without anyone remembering your brand or taking action. Focus on metrics that show people are actually moving closer to a purchase.

Pay attention to where traffic comes from (like organic search, search ads, social media ads) and which of those segments converts the best. You can do this with tools like GA4 and Crazy Egg, which let you filter your traffic by source and see where your best customers are coming from.

How to get in front of the right people

Paid social media: Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok Ads are the primary social channels for raising awareness in ecommerce. Your ads should be “scroll-stoppers” with clear, benefit-focused messaging. Show your product solving a problem rather than listing features. Make use of platform targeting tools to get in front of the right people, but the better job you do matching your ad creative to the wants and desires of a specific target audience, the better the platform algorithms can help you automatically.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Google Ads and Bing Ads let you pay to feature your products at the top of search engine results displayed to active buyers (e.g. keywords like “dog leash”). The more competitive keyword, the higher the ad cost, but you are getting in front of people who are in buying mode.

Search Engine Optimization: SEO is the long game for raising awareness. Focus on informational/educational content that answers questions related to your products. Someone searching “feet hurt after running” might not know your shoe brand exists yet, but that blog post introduces you early in their journey. With AI overviews becoming shoppable, ranking in these results can put your products directly in front of searchers without them even clicking through to a traditional search result.

Organic social media marketing: Instead of paying for promotion, you create and share your own content that gets liked and shared, spreading your message. Short-form video is killing it these days, but checklists, recipes, “what I learned doing X”, type posts are all great, so long as they have value to the audience you are trying to reach.

Influencer marketing: You can do paid partnerships with influencers who will share your brand with an audience that trusts them. Those with big follower counts are expensive to work with and might get you a lot of views with people outside your target market. Micro-influencers in your niche are less expensive and likely have an audience that would care more about what you offer. Product seeding (sending free products to influencers with no strings attached) builds relationships and generates authentic content. Check out these influencer marketing blogs for the latest tactics.

Quick wins

Audit your top traffic sources and double down on what’s already working
Test “ugly” ad creative (e.g. hand-drawn images or raw footage) against your polished brand content
Use the Rich Results Test in Google Search Console to make sure your products look amazing in SEM ads
Create a piece of educational content that answers a common question in your niche
Run test campaigns on different platforms (e.g. marketing on Quora or Pinterest Ads instead of just Meta Ads)

Stage 2: Interest – Sparking real engagement

Someone clicked through to your site. That’s progress, but it doesn’t mean much yet. Most visitors leave within seconds if they don’t immediately find what they’re looking for or if something feels off.

The interest stage is about engaging visitors once they land. You want to give them reasons to believe that you can help them with their problem or fulfill their desire. Make it easy for them to explore your products and understand what you offer.

Key interest metrics to track

Pages per session: How many pages visitors view before leaving
Average session duration: How long people stay on your site
Bounce rate: Percentage of visitors who leave immediately without interacting
Product detail page (PDP) views: How many visitors actually make it to your product pages

These metrics tell you whether visitors are actually engaging with your site or bouncing immediately.

High bounce rates and low session durations suggest that something is off. You might be attracting bad traffic (people who aren’t actually interested in your products), or your site isn’t serving good traffic bad content (there’s a mismatch between what they clicked to visit and what they found when they arrived).

How to create meaningful engagement

Make a strong first impression. Whether visitors land on a landing page or your homepage, it should immediately communicate what you sell and who it’s for. Use clear images, a benefit-driven headline, and intuitive navigation to your main product categories. You cannot make web design mistakes and expect people to stick around.

Build enticing product pages. If people click through to take a closer look at products, that’s great. These pages should be information-rich and persuasive. High-quality images from multiple angles are a must, as are accurate product descriptions that showcase their benefits. Make all the text beginner-friendly. Don’t assume visitors know your products or the wider market as well as you do.

Provide a quality mobile experience. Most ecommerce traffic is mobile now, so if your site is clunky on phones, you’re dead in the water. Ensure it’s easy to swipe around, explore your navigation menu, tap buttons, and that all images look sharp on small screens.

Quick wins

Stage 3: Consideration – Proving you’re the best choice

At this point, visitors are actively evaluating whether to buy from you. They’ve browsed your products, maybe even signed up for your newsletter. But they’re not sold yet. They’re comparing you to competitors, reading reviews, and looking for reasons to trust you with their money.

The consideration stage is where you must help people overcome their doubts. You do this by answering their questions, standing out from competitors, signalling that your brand is worth believing in, and satisfactorily addressing all the objections they have.

Key consideration metrics

Add-to-cart rate (ATC): The percentage of product page visitors that add items to their cart.
PDP exit rate: The percentage of people who leave your site from product pages.
Lead capture rate: Percentage of visitors who opt in to your list (email or SMS)

These metrics are usually tracked automatically by your ecommerce platform or web analytics tool. If you can set up custom goal tracking, you can look at how often people check customer reviews or shipping information for certain products, which can help you figure out what’s pulling people through your funnel.

How to prove your brand is the best

Include customer reviews and ratings. This is a must. You can say whatever you want about your product, but website visitors are always going to put more faith in what other people say about you. Recent reviews, customer photos, and other types of social proof are essential for building trust.

Create helpful content. The goal is to answer “why you over competitors” before they go looking for alternatives. Create size charts, product comparison tables, or “which product is right for you” quizzes. Make it easy for people to figure out what fits their needs without leaving your site to research.

Include visible trust signals: People who don’t know your brand want to be sure you are legit. One easy way to do this is to ensure that there are plenty of trust signals in prominent places across your site. They can be small bits of text (like, “proudly selling since 2019”), press mentions, or validation from reputable third-parties, like the BBB or Shopify.

Link to or include comprehensive FAQs. Answer questions and handle objections right on the page. People want to know about shipping times, return policies, and you don’t want to make them dig for it.

Showcase user-generated content (UGC). Create a branded hashtag and put it everywhere (packaging inserts, order confirmations, your Instagram bio). When customers post using your product and tag you or use your hashtag, ask permission to feature their photos on your site. Showing real people enjoying your product is a fantastic way to build trust.

Offer low effort, high-value lead magnets. Since 95% of people are unlikely to buy on the first visit, a convincing lead magnet allows you to snag their email or phone number before they leave. Opt in pop-ups work (despite what people say) if you offer something valuable (like a discount or access to gated content). Getting contact info means you can market to these people again.

Quick wins

Add customer reviews to your top five products,
Make links to your return policy and shipping timeframes more prominent
Add badges to top products like “Best seller,” “Top-rated”, or “Trending”.
Create a simple comparison chart that highlights your brands strengths compared your top competitors
Improve your FAQ content by looking at common questions fielded by customer support

Stage 4: Conversion – Clearing the path to purchase

Visitors found your site, engaged with your products, and decided you’re the right choice. Now they just need to complete the purchase. This sounds like it ought to be the easy part, but sadly it’s where tons of ecommerce stores blow it.

The conversion stage is all about removing barriers. Every extra click, confusing form field, or unexpected cost is another obstacle between intent and sale. The average cart abandonment rate is around 70%, which means most people who decide to buy still don’t follow through.

Your job here is simple: clear every obstacle standing between “add to cart” and “order complete.” This isn’t the time for creativity or extra steps. It’s about making the path to purchase as smooth and frictionless as possible. Use every conversion rate optimization trick available.

Key conversion metrics

Cart abandonment rate: Percentage of people who add to cart but don’t complete purchase
Checkout abandonment rate: Percentage of people who start checkout but don’t finish
Conversion rate from add-to-cart: Percentage of cart adds that become purchases
Time to complete checkout: How long it takes from cart to purchase

These metrics pinpoint exactly where you’re losing sales. High cart abandonment rate with low checkout starts means people are bailing before they even try to buy. High checkout abandonment means a snag in your checkout flow is probably hurting sales.

How to clear the path to purchase

Streamline your checkout process. Remove every unnecessary step. Offering guest checkout rather than making people create an account is an easy way to drive up the conversion rate. Use autofill for addresses. Pre-select the fastest shipping option. The fewer decisions and clicks required, the better.

Add inline validation. Simple little green checks that tell people they filled out the field correctly are great. You don’t want people to have to go back through the form after they hit submit to figure out where they made a mistake.

Be transparent about all costs upfront. Unexpected shipping costs are the number one reason people abandon checkout. Show shipping costs early, ideally on the product page or immediately when someone adds to cart. If you can’t offer free shipping, don’t surprise people with fees at the last second.

Offer multiple payment options. Credit cards are standard, but Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and Shop Pay all increase conversions by making checkout faster.

Display trust signals at checkout. Security badges, money-back guarantees, and customer service contact info all reassure nervous buyers. You don’t need a wall of trust badges, but you do want to make your site look legitimate for first-time buyers who are wary of entering their credit card info on a new site.

Setup cart abandonment emails. Someone who added to cart but didn’t buy is still interested. Send a reminder email within an hour, then follow up 24 hours later with a slight incentive (free shipping, small discount).

Enable exit popups. Offer a small discount, highlight free shipping, or simply ask if they have questions. It won’t save everyone, but it’ll recover some sales you’d otherwise lose.

Quick wins

Run a quick CRO audit to make sure you have made the experience as easy as possible
Enable guest checkout if you don’t have it already
Add estimated shipping costs to product pages or cart
Set up a basic cart abandonment email sequence
Add a well-timed exit popup to product pages

Stage 5: Retention – Creating repeat customers & building loyalty

The sale is complete, but the funnel does not end there. Not if you want to really make money over the long term and grow your store. This stage, sometimes called post-purchase, is the most valuable stage of your funnel. Why? Because it costs a lot more money to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one.

At this stage, the goal is customer retention, turning one-time buyers into repeat customers and advocates for your brand who bring your new customers through word of mouth. The more customers you can keep, the more you can afford to spend winning new customers without slowing down growth.

Key retention metrics

Repeat purchase rate: Percentage of customers who more than once
Purchase frequency: How many times a customer buys during a year.
Retention rate: Percentage of customers who stay active over time
Customer acquisition costs (CAC): How much it costs to acquire a new customer
Customer lifetime value (CLV): The total expected revenue from a customer over their entire relationship with your brand.

These metrics tell you whether you are growing a sustainable business. If you can drive retention, purchase frequency, and repeat purchase rate higher, it drives up the customer lifetime value. On the other hand, if those rates are low and CAC is high, you wind up burning money to acquire customers that are not worth as much in the long-run, which isn’t sustainable.

How to drive repeat purchases and build brand loyalty

Investing in exceptional customer service. This is where you really win people over, especially when they have a problem with your product and you can help them feel even better about buying from you. Every support interaction is an opportunity to strengthen their relationship with your brand.

Create a loyalty program. This is a great way to incentivize customers to buy from you again. Many ecommerce platforms make it easy to get set up as opposed to starting from scratch.

Introduce a subscription model. Not every brand can do this, but if possible, I would. Subscriptions work best as a win-win where the customers get convenience and savings by signing up for recurring orders, and the company gets a consistent source of revenue.

Put thought into your post-purchase email sequence. Hit the basics well (confirmations, order tracking, and delivery), but consider follow-up emails that include product-care tips, how-to content, and special offers on complementary purchases. Another smart move is to incentivize reviews and encourage people to tag your products on social media.

Launch a referral program. Offer people discounts, store credit, or free products, if they can bring you new customers. Make it as easy as possible for customers to share the offer using pre-written messages and one-click offers for email, text, and social.

Quick wins

Run a “win back” email campaign to reach customers who haven’t bought in 90 days
Text (or email) your top 10 customers personally thanking them and asking what they’d like to see next
Set up a simple post-purchase survey (2-3 questions max) to understand why people buy and what might bring them back
Include a “save 15% on your next order” card in every package with a unique code

Real Example of Ecommerce Funnel

Let’s take a look at a real funnel from start to finish.

Awareness

I took out my phone (like most people who shop online), and I started by searching Google for “mens backpack”.

Grabbing all of the focus at the top of the results page was a carousel of sponsored ads for backpacks. I chose to look closer at the backpack from Troubador Goods (because I’d never heard of the brand before).

Like the other top ads, this one had rich results like:

A high-quality image of the backpack
A “20% OFF” discount badge
Discount pricing shown ($199.02 $249)
A 4.7 star rating
Shop now button

When people don’t know a brand, you really need all of the rich result elements to be working together to grab people’s attention. You can always check the structured data on your pages in Google Search Console to make sure your products are displaying properly in search results.

Interest

When I clicked, I arrived on the product details page for this specific backpack. I cycled through a few of the images and found one that showed the backpack open and packed full of gear.

Notably the price shown was not the discounted price I saw in search results, though the discount code was visible in the banner at the top.

The image of the backpack took up about 50% of the visible area of the page (pretty standard), and the remaining area the product title, price, a short description, a button to view the customer reviews (4.9 stars out of 674 total reviews), and the navigation menu.

Notice that the nav bar is on the bottom, and the largest element by far is the “Add to Bag” button. Large, easy-to-tap buttons located in the heart of the “thumb zone” are ideal for increasing the conversion rate.

Consideration

I liked the backpack, but I wasn’t sold yet, so I scrolled down and explored the site a little further. I was particularly interested in the images that showed how great the backpack performed in bad weather (which is important where I live).

Along with a high quality image that showed the backpack defending against the rain, there was a short headline, “Durability redefined,” followed by some copywriting aimed at humanistic buyers, one of the four fundamental types of buyers, that called out the brand’s commitment to sustainability.

I wanted to hear from actual customers, so I scrolled back up and clicked on the reviews button.

It was almost all 5-star reviews from within the last month. Recent reviews are key, but what I liked was how authentic they were.

One of the reviews was literally just a cry for help from a buyer who had lost their order #. Obviously, such a review doesn’t help me make a decision about whether or not to purchase the backpack, but it does signal that these are real reviews from real people.

Satisfied that enough buyers had found success with this backpack, I took a closer look at some of the important product details.

All of the details were written in short, crisp, benefit-driven language. A quick bolded phrase followed by no more than a single sentence description.

Whether you scan this section or read it closely, you are going to come away knowing that it is a lightweight, comfortable, durable backpack.

Conversion

Tapping “Add to Bag” I was brought to a checkout page.

The very first thing I saw is a one line order summary followed by an express checkout option with four forms of instant payment. Talk about making it easy to buy.

Below that was an invitation to provide my email, with a prechecked box that signed me up for “early access to new products and exclusive offers.” Fairly standard language there, but a good lead generation tactic nonetheless.

The remainder of the checkout process included nothing out of the ordinary. Minimal form fields, large buttons, and plenty of trust signals letting me know the transaction was “secure and encrypted.”

When it comes to optimizing checkout flows, you don’t have to do anything creative or out of the box. Troubadour didn’t. They just made it as easy as possible for me to enter my information and complete the process.

Next Steps: Optimizing Your Ecommerce Funnel

Now you know where your funnel leaks and how to plug them. The next step is taking a close look at the real traffic on your site and what it’s doing.

Using a tool like Crazy Egg, you can dig into the traffic on your page and see what’s actually happening. It’s like GA4, but not a complete hassle to use.

With the free forever version of Crazy Egg, you get web analytics so you can find out where your best traffic is coming from, your top performing pages, and your biggest opportunities to improve.

With premium versions, you’ll get access to features like:

Heatmaps that show you where visitors click and where they ignore your CTAs
Session recordings that let you watch where people get confused or frustrated
Error tracking that reveals broken elements and technical issues that kill conversions

Once you identify the problems, A/B testing lets you experiment with fixes and validate what actually works. Test different headlines, button placements, product page layouts, or checkout flows. Measure the results, deploy the winner, and then keep testing.

Running this sort of CRO testing helps you find wins that compound over time, significantly improving your funnel over the long term.

Your funnel will never be perfect, but it can always be better. Start with your worst-performing stage and work from there. Good luck.

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