In this guide
Optimizing conversion rates for retail and consumer brands
Optimizing conversion rates for retail and consumer brands
Accelerate growth and streamline operations by crafting frictionless ecommerce experiences that reduce cart abandonment, maximize conversions, and exceed customer expectations.
This guide shares how some of the most successful retailers and consumer brands have tackled challenges with conversion rate optimization. By addressing common challenges—like fragmented customer journeys and missed personalization opportunities—you’ll see how they boosted conversion rates and elevated customer satisfaction.
This guide will help you:
- Pinpoint and understand customer pain points
- Prototype and refine solutions to optimize the customer journey
- Create innovative new customer experiences, cutting-edge digital features, and fresh ways to engage with customers
- Benchmark success and create customer-first experiences that drive loyalty
Why optimizing conversion rates matters now
For retailers and consumer goods companies, optimizing conversion rates is a cornerstone of digital success. It directly impacts revenue, profitability, and customer acquisition costs (CAC), making it a priority for digital commerce leaders. However, despite its importance, conversion optimization remains a significant challenge for many in the industry.
Retailers operate in an environment where even a marginal improvement in conversion rates can translate into millions of dollars in additional revenue. Yet, many struggle to achieve these gains due to growing consumer expectations for seamless and personalized digital experiences.
Shoppers compare every online interaction to the convenience and speed offered by competitors, old and new. Without investing in continuous optimization, retailers risk losing potential customers at critical stages of the journey, such as product discovery, checkout, or post-purchase.
Conversion optimization also plays a critical role in mitigating costs. High cart abandonment rates, for instance, mean retailers waste significant marketing spend attracting customers who fail to convert. Likewise, lower conversion rates lead to higher CAC and decreased ROI on digital advertising efforts. By providing frictionless experiences, retailers can not only improve sales but also maximize the efficiency of their marketing investments.
The impact of low ecommerce conversion rates
When ecommerce conversion rates are low, the negative effects on your business can be profound, impacting both growth and profitability:
- Higher customer acquisition costs (CAC): Driving traffic to your website becomes less efficient when fewer visitors convert, leading to higher costs per sale and diminished marketing ROI.
- Lost revenue opportunities: Every visitor who doesn’t convert represents a missed chance to generate income, cross-sell complementary products, or build customer loyalty.
- Reduced lifetime value (LTV): Fewer initial conversions mean fewer opportunities to nurture customers into repeat buyers, limiting long-term profitability.
- Inefficient operations: Poor conversion rates lead to slower revenue growth while keeping operational costs constant, eroding efficiency and margins.
- Competitive disadvantage: When customers encounter friction or frustrations on your site, they’re more likely to turn to competitors who offer smoother and more personalized shopping experiences.
On the other hand, optimizing conversion rates unlocks these opportunities, driving revenue growth, improving operational efficiency, and positioning your brand as a leader in customer-centric ecommerce.
The challenge: retailers and direct-to-consumer brands struggle with conversion optimization
In the evolving landscape of US ecommerce, retailers and direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands face significant hurdles in optimizing conversion rates. Despite substantial investments in digital marketing and platform enhancements, many traditional retailers and DTC brands are not meeting consumer expectations for seamless online shopping experiences.
Key challenges:
- Stagnant conversion rates: The average ecommerce conversion rate in the US is approximately 2-3%, indicating that a vast majority of website visitors do not complete purchases.
- High cart abandonment: Cart abandonment rates are alarmingly high, with studies showing an average rate of 69.57%. Factors contributing to this include unexpected costs, complicated checkout processes, and concerns over payment security.
- Rising customer acquisition costs (CAC): As competition intensifies, the cost to acquire new customers has increased. For every $92 spent on customer acquisition, only $1 is spent on conversion rate optimization, highlighting a disparity that affects profitability.
- Mobile optimization issues: With mobile commerce accounting for a significant portion of online sales, retailers must ensure their mobile platforms are optimized. However, mobile conversion rates often lag behind desktop rates due to suboptimal user experiences.
Failing to address these challenges can lead to lost revenue opportunities, decreased customer lifetime value, and a weakened competitive position in the market. To thrive, U.S. retailers and DTC brands must prioritize conversion rate optimization by streamlining the customer journey, enhancing mobile experiences, and effectively utilizing data to meet and exceed consumer expectations.
Diagnose your problem
Signs of a less-than-ideal ecommerce experience include low conversion rates—especially on mobile, high cart abandonment rates, and customer frustration with your site. Many retailers and direct-to-consumer brands face challenges delivering seamless shopping experiences due to friction-filled journeys and under-optimized processes.
Not sure if your digital shopping experience meets customer expectations? Watch for these signs:
- High cart abandonment rates: Are users adding items to their cart but not completing the purchase?
- Low mobile conversions: Is your site optimized for mobile, where most traffic originates but conversion rates tend to lag?
- Slow checkout processes: How long does it take to complete the checkout process? Drop-off rates spike when it’s overly complicated or time-consuming.
- Customer complaints: Are you receiving negative feedback about navigation, usability, or the overall shopping experience?
Metrics that matter
To identify potential issues and areas for improvement, monitor these key ecommerce performance metrics:
- Conversion rates: What percentage of visitors complete a purchase? The average ecommerce conversion rate is around 2-3%, so even small gains can significantly impact revenue.
- Cart abandonment rates: At what point in the journey are customers abandoning their carts? Globally, this rate averages nearly 70%.
- Checkout Completion Times: How long does it take for a customer to move from adding items to completing a purchase? Streamlining this process can make a big difference.
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT): What do customers say about their experience? Surveys and feedback can reveal pain points that may not appear in metrics alone.
These metrics indicate that something in your ecommerce journey may need attention. Once you identify an opportunity for improvement, you can take steps to eliminate friction, simplify processes, and create a seamless shopping experience that drives results.
Solution: optimize and innovate for higher conversions
Leading retailers and direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands achieve higher conversion rates by focusing on two key strategies: optimizing their digital shopping experiences and driving innovation through deep customer insights.
By refining what works and testing new solutions, top-performing brands meet and exceed customer expectations—turning browsers into buyers and setting themselves apart in an increasingly competitive ecommerce landscape.
Here’s how to implement these strategies to boost conversions and maximize revenue.
Optimize your digital shopping experience
1. Identify friction in the customer journey
Understanding where shoppers encounter friction—whether in product discovery, cart management, or checkout—is the first step to improving conversion rates. Here’s how to diagnose and fix problem areas:
- Analyze website and app data: Use heatmaps, funnel reports, and drop-off analytics to pinpoint where users abandon their journey. Look for high exit rates on product pages or during checkout.
- Leverage customer support insights: Your customer service team hears common complaints firsthand—use their feedback to identify frustrating shopping experiences.
- Monitor social media and reviews: Unfiltered feedback from customers on social platforms can highlight pain points you might not see in traditional analytics.
Once you identify the barriers to conversion, you can take targeted action to streamline the path to purchase.
How UserTesting helps
Pinpoint CX gaps and improve onboarding: UserTesting enables teams to evaluate the customer experience (CX) with precision with QXscore™. This 100-point score blends behavioral and attitudinal data, measuring elements like usability, satisfaction, trust, and Net Promoter Score™ (NPS).
By aligning what customers do with how they feel, QXscore uncovers weak spots in the digital account opening process, highlighting areas where customer expectations and actual experiences misalign. Teams can prioritize and target specific improvements to create a more seamless, customer-focused onboarding experience.
2. Discover the ‘why’ behind shopper abandonment
Pinpointing where customers drop off is just the first step—understanding why they abandon their purchase is what leads to meaningful improvements. In retail ecommerce, abandonment happens for a variety of reasons: unexpected costs at checkout, slow site performance, unclear product details, or a frustrating mobile experience. But every retailer faces unique challenges, which is why gathering direct shopper feedback is essential.
How to uncover the real reasons behind drop-offs:
- Test real shopping journeys: Have actual customers go through your site’s key flows—searching for products, browsing categories, filtering results, adding items to their cart, and completing checkout. Pay close attention to where they hesitate or abandon the process.
- Encourage ‘think-aloud’ feedback: Ask participants to verbalize their thoughts as they interact with your site. This helps reveal confusion, frustration, or hesitation that might not be captured by analytics alone.
- Capture shopper behavior in action:
- Record sessions to see how customers navigate your store, interact with product pages, and respond to checkout steps.
- Analyze behavior and direct feedback to identify pain points, confusing elements, or trust barriers.
This approach goes beyond numbers—it provides human context to explain why conversion rates are lagging. By connecting directly with shoppers during their journey, you can uncover what’s working, what’s frustrating, and which optimizations will make the biggest impact on sales.
How UserTesting helps
Connect with the right audience quickly: Many of your customers and potential customers— including those who abandoned the account opening process—may already be part of the UserTesting Network. Our knowledgebase offers guidance to help you screen for specific audiences, ensuring you reach the right people.
You can also use your own network, including current customers, past customers, or those who dropped off. Using your audience gives you highly targeted insights to drive meaningful improvements.
Capture a vivid, first-person understanding of any experience: Remote self-guided tests allow participants to complete tasks and answer questions on their own time while sharing their thoughts out loud. Their screens, voices, or faces are recorded, giving you detailed feedback about their experience. With UserTesting, you can run tests with as many—or as few—participants as needed.
To uncover why customers abandon the account opening process:
- Focus tasks on specific steps where drop-offs are likely to occur.
- Ask questions that capture participants’ thoughts and preferences, such as verbal feedback, written answers, or ranking tasks.
- Combine usability tasks with attitudinal questions to observe moments of confusion, frustration, or hesitation.
This approach helps you not only pinpoint where customers struggle but also understand the reasons behind their challenges—providing actionable insights to improve the experience.
Unlock insights faster: Spend less time watching videos and let AI point you to key trends and themes with analysis solutions, including the AI Insight Summary, automated transcripts, sentiment analysis, interactive path flow, intent paths, friction detection, keyword mapping, and more.
3. Refine your shopping experience with actionable prototyping
Once you’ve identified where and why customers encounter friction in their shopping journey, the next step is to develop solutions that enhance the experience. Using insights from real shopper feedback, you can pinpoint specific issues—whether it’s an unclear product page, a confusing checkout process, or a frustrating navigation flow—and take action to optimize them.
Turn insights into high-impact improvements
- Start with simple prototypes:
- Sketch or create low-fidelity prototypes of key improvements, such as streamlined checkout flows, better category filters, or a more intuitive mobile experience.
- You don’t need a fully functional redesign—early concepts and wireframes work just fine to test usability and shopper reactions.
- Get customer feedback early:
- Share your ideas with real shoppers before investing in development.
- Conduct user testing to see how customers react to potential changes in navigation, product displays, and checkout flows.
- Test and iterate for maximum impact:
- Use self-guided tests where shoppers interact with your experience’s new designs and provide feedback.
- Gather insights on usability, clarity, and engagement—then refine based on real customer experiences.
By continuously testing and refining with direct shopper input, you can ensure that your optimizations meet customer expectations. Validating solutions early in the process prevents costly missteps and ensures every improvement drives higher conversions and better customer satisfaction.
This "measure twice, cut once" approach saves time, reduces risk, and creates a shopping experience that truly resonates with your audience.
How UserTesting helps
Validate ideas quickly: UserTesting’s Live Conversation makes it easy to test early ideas and concepts by engaging directly with participants in real time. Share simple designs and sketches, or even describe your concept, and observe participants’ immediate reactions.
The best part? You don’t need a fully functional prototype. By focusing on how the idea works, you can collect feedback on the concept itself. During the session, ask follow-up questions to clarify responses and dive deeper into participants’ thoughts. This helps you uncover valuable insights, spot areas of confusion, and validate whether your concept resonates with users.
Enhance CX with real-world design feedback: When you’re ready to test a clickable prototype, UserTesting streamlines the process. Integrate your designs from tools like Figma and let participants interact with them independently through self-guided testing.
Participants provide feedback on key aspects such as usability, clarity, and potential friction points. This approach ensures your designs are tested in real-world scenarios, giving you actionable insights to refine the user experience and create a seamless shopping experience.
4. Find the best shopping experience with customer preference testing
When evaluating multiple versions of your product pages, checkout flows, navigation layouts, or promotional banners, customer preference testing helps you quickly determine which design resonates most with shoppers. Instead of guessing, you can gather direct feedback to refine your designs and ensure they drive higher conversions.
How to use preference testing:
- Compare different product detail page layouts (e.g., image placement, review visibility, CTA button styles).
- Test variations of checkout processes (e.g., checkout steps, guest checkout visibility).
- Evaluate different navigation structures (e.g., category menu organization, filter placements, search bar prominence).
- Assess promotional content effectiveness (e.g., discount messaging, urgency tactics, shipping callouts).
Once you identify the highest-performing design, you can further validate it with A/B testing to see how it impacts real-world conversions. This method ensures you launch the most effective experience—one that aligns with customer preferences and maximizes sales.
How UserTesting helps
Identify customer-preferred designs: With UserTesting, conducting preference testing for your shopping experience is simple and effective. Present participants with two or three design variations—such as different search filters, product detail page layouts, or navigation designs—and ask them to select their preferred option.
To gain deeper insights:
- Include tasks or questions that simulate the shopping journey to understand how participants interact with each design.
- Ask participants to explain their choice, uncovering why they favor one design over another.
This approach not only identifies the option that offers the best customer experience but also highlights actionable opportunities to further refine your designs.
5. Optimize retail content with shopper insights
Content plays a crucial role in converting browsers into buyers. Product descriptions, images, reviews, pricing transparency, and shipping details all impact a shopper’s decision to complete a purchase.
If content is unclear, incomplete, or misleading, it creates hesitation—leading to high bounce rates, abandoned carts, and lost sales.
How to optimize content for conversion success:
- Enhance product pages for clarity and persuasion
- Ensure high-quality images and videos showcase products from multiple angles.
- Write detailed, benefit-driven product descriptions that answer common questions.
- Highlight key features, materials, sizing guides, and care instructions to reduce uncertainty.
- Improve inventory and shipping transparency
- Display real-time stock availability to create urgency and prevent frustration.
- Clearly communicate delivery times, costs, and return policies to reduce checkout hesitation.
- Offer estimated delivery dates instead of vague shipping windows.
- Leverage social proof and reviews
- Feature authentic customer reviews and user-generated content to build trust.
- Use star ratings and customer testimonials prominently on product pages.
- Highlight common concerns and how products address them (e.g., “Runs small—order one size up”).
- Optimize calls to action (CTAs) for engagement
- Experiment with CTA wording, placement, and color to see what drives the most clicks.
- Test urgency-driven messaging (e.g., “Limited Stock—Order Now” vs. “Add to Cart”) to encourage action.
- Streamline instructions for a smoother shopping experience
- Simplify complex steps with concise language and tooltips (e.g., “How to Apply a Discount Code”).
- Use progress indicators in multi-step checkouts to reduce drop-offs.
- Personalize messaging for higher conversions
- Tailor product recommendations and promotional messages based on user behavior and past purchases.
- Show dynamic content, such as “You may also like” suggestions based on browsing history.
Why content optimization matters
Every piece of content in your experience guides the shopper’s journey—from discovery to checkout. Well-optimized content builds trust, removes friction, and increases conversions. By continuously testing and refining messaging, product information, and CTAs, retailers can reduce drop-offs, drive higher engagement, and ultimately boost sales.
How UserTesting helps
Convey the right message: UserTesting empowers you to gather feedback on your content. By seeing shoppers interact and respond to your content, you can identify unclear messaging, confusing terms, or areas where additional guidance is needed.
Use these insights to refine your content for maximum impact, ensuring it aligns with customer expectations and increases conversion rates. Learn more about content testing.
Generate new ideas to lead the market
Sometimes, optimizing existing processes isn’t enough—standing out in a competitive retail landscape requires bold, new ideas. By leveraging customer insights, you can develop game-changing shopping experiences, introduce innovative digital features, and create fresh incentives that drive conversions and loyalty.
1. Discover new opportunities through customer needs
Innovation in ecommerce begins with a deep understanding of your customers. Engaging directly with shoppers—both those who complete purchases and those who drop off—can reveal unmet needs, friction points, and new opportunities to enhance the shopping experience and drive conversions.
How to gather customer insights to fuel innovation:
- Talk to current customers: Focus on shoppers who have completed purchases but faced challenges along the way. Were they frustrated by a lack of product details? Did they struggle with checkout or payment options?
- Connect with cart abandoners: Reach out to customers who added items but never completed checkout. Identify whether high shipping costs, unclear return policies, or technical issues caused them to leave.
- Engage potential customers: Speak with new visitors who browse but don’t buy to understand what might encourage them to convert. Do they need more product comparisons, social proof, or alternative payment methods?
Turn insights into innovation
By leveraging these insights, you can develop customer-driven enhancements, such as:
- AI-powered shopping assistants that provide real-time recommendations and product comparisons.
- Dynamic checkout personalization with auto-filled shipping details and preferred payment options.
- Exclusive incentives (e.g., first-time buyer discounts, loyalty perks, or bundle deals) tailored to specific customer behaviors.
- Seamless omnichannel experiences that integrate online shopping with in-store perks like BOPIS (Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store) or in-store return options.
Understanding why shoppers abandon their carts, what information they need to feel confident, and what incentives drive engagement will help you create a more intuitive, personalized, and high-converting ecommerce experience that differentiates your brand in a crowded market.
How UserTesting helps
Understand customer needs: The UserTesting platform makes it easy to connect with your audience, whether they’re current customers, prospects, or those who abandoned the process. Choose the approach that fits your needs:
- Live Conversations: Speak with participants in real time, ask follow-up questions, and explore their experiences in depth.
- Self-guided tests: Participants complete tasks independently, offering honest, candid feedback as they reflect privately on their journey.
To gather actionable insights, ask open-ended questions such as:
- What would motivate you to make a purchase?
- What features or benefits would make this experience more appealing?
- What improvements or innovations would you expect from a brand like ours?
If you’re unsure which method to choose, try both! Live Conversations provide detailed, interactive discussions, while self-guided tests capture candid, independent feedback.
For an even faster setup, use one of UserTesting’s discovery templates to structure your research and quickly uncover valuable insights.
Unlock insights faster: Spend less time watching videos and let AI point you to key trends and themes with analysis solutions, including the AI Insight Summary, automated transcripts, sentiment analysis, interactive path flow, intent paths, friction detection, keyword mapping, and more.
2. Gain competitive intelligence to drive innovation
Staying ahead in the competitive retail market requires continuous innovation. According to McKinsey, globally, 20% of total sales are now made from online purchases, underscoring the importance of a robust e-commerce strategy. Competitive intelligence is a powerful tool for inspiring new ideas and optimizing the ecommerce shopping experience.
By understanding how shoppers engage with competitors, you can uncover what works, where gaps exist, and what truly influences buying decisions—allowing you to differentiate your brand and stay ahead.
How to leverage competitive insights:
- Study competitor shopping experiences: Analyze the UX/UI of top-performing retail sites, from product search and checkout flows to mobile responsiveness and delivery options.
- Engage competitor shoppers: Gather feedback from customers who frequently shop with your competitors to understand why they choose those brands and what keeps them coming back.
- Expand beyond direct competitors: Look beyond brands in your category—marketplaces, DTC disruptors, and social commerce platforms are setting new standards in convenience and personalization.
- Analyze promotions and loyalty strategies: Compare discount structures, rewards programs, free shipping thresholds, and membership perks to see what resonates most with shoppers.
Turn insights into competitive advantages: With a clear understanding of competitor strengths and weaknesses, your team can:
- Refine product discovery and personalization to create a more seamless and engaging shopping journey.
- Optimize checkout processes by addressing common friction points seen in competitor experiences.
- Develop standout loyalty programs and incentives that encourage repeat purchases and brand advocacy.
- Enhance fulfillment and post-purchase experiences by learning from industry leaders in speed, convenience, and customer support.
By adapting and innovating based on real shopper insights and competitive benchmarking, you can deliver an ecommerce experience that meets and exceeds customer expectations—driving higher conversions, retention, and long-term brand loyalty.
How UserTesting helps
Capture high-quality insights quickly from any audience: The UserTesting platform simplifies getting competitive insights by helping you connect with participants who recently purchased from your competitors. Use filters and screeners to find the right audience and choose the method that works best for your goals:
- Live Conversations: Engage participants in real time to ask follow-up questions and explore their experiences in depth.
- Self-guided tests: Let participants provide feedback independently, often leading to more honest and candid insights.
Ask open-ended questions about their experiences, such as:
- What did you like most about the shopping experience?
- What challenges or frustrations did you encounter?
- What improvements or features would have made the experience better?
Take it further by exploring their aspirations and future shopping needs. Ask about the incentives, products, or benefits that would inspire them to become a loyalty customer, helping you design compelling offerings that stand out. Learn more about competitive testing with UserTesting.
If you’re unsure which method to use, try both! Combining live discussions with self-guided responses gives you a mix of detailed, interactive insights and authentic, independent feedback.
3. Analyze and share insights
Once you’ve gathered feedback from real shoppers, the next step is to analyze, summarize, and share key insights in a way that makes them easy to understand and act on. Retail teams move fast, so distilling insights into actionable takeaways is critical for driving improvements that boost conversion rates, enhance product discovery, and streamline checkout.
How to make shopper insights actionable:
Create short video clips and highlight reels: Extract key moments from user testing sessions, such as frustration points in checkout, confusion on product pages, or hesitation over pricing and shipping details. These clips help teams quickly grasp what’s working and what’s not.
Share findings across teams: Ensure stakeholders in merchandising, UX, digital marketing, and customer service understand shopper pain points so they can work together to improve product pages, promotions, and overall site experience.
Host a customer insight watch party: Bring teams together to watch real shopper interactions and discuss improvements.
How to make it effective:
- Choose key videos: Focus on clips that highlight major challenges, missed conversion opportunities, or standout “aha” moments.
- Invite cross-functional teams: Include product managers, UX designers, marketers, and customer service leads to ensure diverse perspectives.
- Facilitate discussions: Pause and reflect on common themes, unexpected insights, and areas for improvement.
- Document and prioritize: Capture key takeaways and outline next steps for optimizing the shopping journey, checkout experience, or product presentation.
By bringing the customer’s voice into team discussions, you create a customer-first approach to ecommerce optimization. This process aligns teams around real user needs, helping retailers deliver seamless, friction-free shopping experiences that drive conversions and long-term loyalty.
How UserTesting helps
Unlock insights faster: UserTesting provides a wealth of attitudinal and behavioral data, enabling digital teams to better understand and empathize with their customers throughout the shopping experience. With interactive visualizations and AI-powered tools, teams can quickly analyze and distill data into clear, actionable insights. These tools highlight critical trends or anomalies, even in large datasets. For a deeper understanding, you can easily review original video feedback to fully validate your findings. Whether working with individual sessions or high-level visualizations, the platform simplifies and streamlines the analysis process.
Drive buy-in through human insight: Turning raw feedback into actionable insights is effortless with UserTesting. You can transcribe, clip, edit, tag, and share key moments from videos, allowing your team to focus on what matters most. Create short clips to showcase impactful responses or observations, highlighting specific challenges, needs, or opportunities.
For recurring themes or critical findings, group clips into highlight reels to easily share insights across your organization. This makes it simple to bring customer feedback to life and align your teams on shared goals.
Establish a shared understanding of your customers: UserTesting’s Insights Hub is your centralized resource for building a shared understanding of your customers. This knowledge base allows teams to store, discover, and collaborate on customer insights—all in one place. Whether it’s product and design teams or marketing and leadership, everyone has access to the latest findings and feedback.
By unifying your organization’s experience data, the Insights Hub helps align strategies, prioritize improvements, and consistently deliver customer-centric solutions.
Plus, seamless integration with external tools ensures insights flow directly into the workflows your teams already use.
4. Brainstorm ideas and iterate with confidence
Start by brainstorming and sketching initial concepts that are rooted in real shopper needs, competitive insights, and your business goals. Whether you’re enhancing the online shopping experience, refining product content, or optimizing promotional messaging, aligning ideas with these insights ensures they address key friction points and resonate with your audience.
Adopting an iterative, feedback-driven approach allows you to test and refine everything from site features to creative assets and content strategies. For example:
Test product titles and descriptions: See which wording increases engagement and conversions.
Experiment with promotional messaging: Identify which discount offers, shipping incentives, or urgency-driven CTAs drive the highest conversions.
Refine imagery and video content: Test product photos, lifestyle shots, and explainer videos to determine what resonates most with shoppers.
Validate content clarity: Ensure that your navigation labels, return policies, and checkout instructions are clear and reduce hesitation.
By incorporating real customer feedback throughout the process, you can fine-tune your approach and confidently launch high-performing product pages, checkout flows, and marketing campaigns. Whether you’re developing functional prototypes, optimizing PDPs, or crafting new promotional strategies, a customer-led approach ensures your innovations drive measurable impact in a competitive retail market.
How UserTesting helps
Get to great faster: UserTesting equips your team with the tools to ideate and iterate confidently:
- Test diverse elements: Evaluate everything from new feature concepts and messaging to creative assets and content clarity. UserTesting allows you to test headlines, taglines, visuals, and more to identify what resonates most with your audience. Learn more about customer insights for marketing teams.
- Iterative feedback loops: Gather actionable insights at every stage, helping you refine and improve your ideas. Whether it’s a design concept or a new marketing campaign, UserTesting ensures you’re on the right track.
With UserTesting, you can confidently transform bold ideas into innovative solutions that stand out in the market.
5. Benchmark for high-quality digital experiences
Benchmarking your online shopping experience helps you assess how well it performs compared to competitors and your internal goals. It’s particularly valuable when designing new site features, optimizing checkout flows, or refining product pages, as it sets clear performance standards before moving into full implementation. With benchmarks in place, retail teams can accelerate project timelines, prioritize the features that matter most to shoppers, and confidently optimize their ecommerce strategy.
How to benchmark your ecommerce performance
Start by evaluating both your current shopping experience and competitors’ offerings. Focus on metrics that assess usability, customer satisfaction, and overall effectiveness to identify gaps and set meaningful improvement goals.
Key usability metrics to track:
- Cart abandonment rate: Percentage of shoppers who add items to their cart but don’t complete checkout.
- Checkout completion time: The average time it takes to move from cart to purchase. Faster checkouts typically result in higher conversions.
- Navigation efficiency: How easily shoppers find and purchase products (e.g., actual steps taken vs. the ideal path).
- Search success rate – How often users successfully find relevant products via site search.
Customer satisfaction metrics to monitor:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures how likely customers are to recommend your store based on their experience.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Captures immediate satisfaction with key shopping interactions (e.g., ease of checkout, product page clarity).
- Return rate and reasoning: High return rates can signal issues with product descriptions, sizing information, or imagery.
Using benchmarking to improve ecommerce performance
Once you’ve established your benchmarking goals, test your prototypes and optimizations against these standards. For example:
If your cart abandonment rate exceeds industry averages (~70%), focus on reducing checkout friction.
If shoppers struggle with site navigation, refine filtering, sorting, and product categorization.
If return rates are high due to misleading product descriptions, enhance content clarity and imagery.
By leveraging benchmarking data, retail teams can identify what’s working, refine underperforming areas, and create an optimized shopping experience that improves both customer satisfaction and profitability.
How UserTesting helps:
Ensure designs meet customer needs: UserTesting’s QXscore provides a clear, measurable quality benchmark to ensure prototypes align with customer expectations before advancing to development. By evaluating key aspects of the user experience—such as ease of use and overall satisfaction—QXscore empowers teams to determine whether their designs are ready to move forward.
This consistent standard ensures every design is thoroughly validated and refined, reducing the risk of usability issues or misaligned features making it into development.
With QXscore as a guide, your team can confidently deliver high-quality, customer-centered prototypes that set the stage for successful digital experiences.
Metrics and success indicators
Tracking and continuously refining your ecommerce experience is critical to long-term success. Establishing and monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)—such as conversion rates, cart abandonment rates, and customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores—helps retail teams measure the effectiveness of their digital shopping journey and demonstrate how customer insights drive meaningful improvements.
By leveraging these insights and regularly monitoring key metrics, ecommerce teams can create a customer-first experience that evolves with shifting shopper expectations—ensuring ongoing relevance, higher conversions, and sustainable growth.
Why monitoring metrics matters
Uncover trends in shopper behavior: Tracking KPIs helps identify patterns, such as seasonal dips in conversion rates or CSAT improvements after checkout optimizations. These insights highlight what’s working and where further improvements are needed.
Link CX improvements to business impact: Tying customer experience enhancements—such as improved site navigation or faster checkout—to measurable revenue growth and lower cart abandonment reinforces how optimizing the digital shopping experience drives tangible business success.
Demonstrate your team’s impact: Sharing metrics-driven success stories helps showcase your team’s contributions, from reducing drop-offs to improving product discovery. It highlights the importance of ongoing, customer-centric innovation and secures buy-in for future optimizations.
Key KPIs for ecommerce success
- Conversion rate: Percentage of site visitors who complete a purchase.
- Cart abandonment rate: Percentage of shoppers who add items to their cart but leave before completing checkout.
- Checkout completion rate: Percentage of shoppers who successfully move through the checkout process.
- Bounce rate: Percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page, often signaling friction in site navigation or product discovery.
- Revenue per visitor (RPV): Measures how much revenue is generated per site visitor.
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): Captures immediate shopper satisfaction with specific site interactions.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures how likely customers are to recommend your ecommerce store to others.
How to use these metrics for continuous optimization
- If cart abandonment rates are high: Simplify checkout, offer guest checkout, and display total costs earlier in the process.
- If bounce rates are high on product pages: Improve product descriptions, add high-quality images, and showcase social proof like reviews.
- If conversion rates are low despite high traffic: Test different promotional messaging, adjust CTAs, and optimize page load speeds.
By establishing KPIs and committing to ongoing analysis, retail teams can proactively refine the shopping experience, drive higher conversions, and showcase the business impact of customer-focused optimizations—ensuring a seamless, profitable ecommerce journey.
How UserTesting helps
Benchmark and improve your CX to stay ahead: UserTesting’s QXscore provides a powerful way to benchmark your digital experiences against competitors and track progress over time. Comparing your QXscore with industry peers reveals areas where your experience excels or needs improvement.
Tracking your QXscore across iterations gives you a clear measure of how updates enhance usability and satisfaction. This ongoing benchmarking ensures your digital experiences remain competitive, maintain a high-quality standard, and evolve to meet customer expectations.
Customer success stories
Here are companies that improved their sales by using human insights.
Abercrombie & Fitch:
Learn how A&F Co. utilized customer insights to build the online A&F Wedding Shop and increase dress sales both online and in-store. Read more here.
Walmart
Learn how Walmart boosted mobile revenue by 13% by increasing conversions with tailored experiences for customers. Read more here.
Burberry
Watch how Burberry improved its app experience and its development of personalized content.
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